The world of science acknowledges matter-of-factly that Iran is not pursuing a nuclear weapons program. There is simply no evidence for one. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency, staffed by specialists on nuclear power and maintaining a tight watch on Iran’s civilian facilities, finds no evidence of a military program. Two successive reports (National Intelligence Estimates) produced (in 2007 and 2010) by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies have declared with confidence that there is no operative weapons program. U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and (even) Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both recently stated (or let it slip) that Iran is not currently attempting to build nuclear weapons.

But then there is the political world of systematic disinformation. The world of big, bold lies which, as they are constantly repeated, acquire a certain life of their own. Thus the mainstream press and the entire political class in this country refer routinely to “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” as though there obviously were one. As though any questioning of the charge were thoroughly naive.

(By the way: try doing an advanced Google search for the exact phrase “Iran’s nuclear weapons program” and you will call up 4,640,000 results. Try “Israel’s nuclear weapons program”—which we know exists—and you’ll get 533,000. What does this tell you?)

The proponents of the lie rest assured that it will resonate, since it pertains to a Muslim country, and people here are largely conditioned to believe the worst about Muslims and see them as all complicit in some sort of anti-U.S. movement. In a poll taken as late as 2007, 41% of U.S. citizens stated their belief that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks!

Similarly, misguided by well-funded and well-placed propagandists, people will believe anything about Iran.

Never mind that Iran has never in modern times attacked another country. Never mind that it had nothing to do with the 9/11 episode, and that thousands of Iranians rallied in solidarity with the people of the U.S. after the attacks. Never mind that the majority of its people and their leaders are Shiites, like the people of Iraq, and that they’re sworn enemies of the Salafists in al-Qaeda as well as the Taliban. To the masters of disinformation they’re purveyors of terror, holding the world hostage to the threat of nuclear attack and Israel to total annihilation.

This view is so patently idiotic than many bright people might just roll their eyes in bewilderment and, lacking McGovern’s capacity for moral indignation, simply give up trying to challenge the mendacity. It’s tiresome, year after year, to refute the ever-expanding web of lies. But this is serious, dangerous idiocy broadcast from the citadels of power. It has become integral to U.S. political culture.

One should—again and again—cite this telling little anecdote. In 2002, as the campaign of lies about Iraq began to pick up steam, an advisor of George W. Bush told New York Times columnist and Pulitzer prize winner Ron Suskind that “guys like” him were in (what the advisor disparaged as) the “the reality-based community.”  That is, people “who believe that solutions emerge from [the] judicious study of discernible reality.”

But no, this top operative (Karl Rove, perhaps?) insisted. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Part of “creating new realities” is lying through your teeth, and spreading fear to obtain your political ends. The mission in 2002 was to persuade the people of this country that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that it threatened us with weapons of mass destruction. No matter that Iraq had been subject to the most intrusive arms inspections regimen in history, was bleeding from sanctions, and wasn’t regarded by any of its neighbors (including Kuwait and Iran, which it had invaded) as a threat. Through coordinated statements (“We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”) and leaks of (mis)information to complicit journalists, the Bush administration built a case for a truly criminal war (frankly pronounced “illegal” by the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, to the outrage of some U.S. diplomats).

If the Bush administration officials weren’t consciously taking their cue from the Nazis, they surely embraced a Nazi-like logic. As Hermann Goering stated before his suicide in 1946, “Naturally the common people don’t want war. But after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag people along… This is easy.  All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger.  It works the same in every country.”

And so we were told to fear an Iraqi nuclear attack on New York City. It worked beautifully. Most of the people were indeed dragged along. Neo-conservatives hell-bent on transforming the “Greater Middle East” to advantage Israel concocted their case through the secretive “Office of Special Plans” and scared a large section of the public into rallying for war. And when no weapons of mass destruction were found, and no evidence for Iraqi-al Qaeda links were found, they slinked offstage quietly (Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle) with no apology, embarrassment or explanation (to say nothing of prosecution).

Who is most responsible for this utter lack of responsibility? Barack Obama! He came to power through the support of antiwar voters. His own opposition to the Iraq war was timid and partial; it was, he thought a “strategic blunder” rather than a crime. (You simply cannot be a politician in the USA and speak honestly about the vicious criminality of its wars.)

The would-be harbinger of Hope and Change was all smiles when he met the outgoing president, and made it clear that there would be no embarrassing Justice Department investigations or prosecutions of Bush-era officials for war crimes. He wasn’t outraged that the highest officials in the land had approved a campaign to hoodwink the people into endorsing a horrific assault on a country that did not threaten us. He just wanted to put that all behind us, be reconciliatory, “unite the country” and move on…

Part of “moving on” meant embracing the neocons’ lies about Iran. In his very first press conference after the 2008 election, Obama signaled his intentions. He was asked about his response to Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s friendly letter congratulating him on his election. He sidestepped the question but used the occasion to grimly declare that the U.S. would not tolerate Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons. It was a shameless sop to the Israel Lobby. And just as George W. Bush ignored the 2007 NIE on Iran’s nuclear program, Obama ignores the 2010 NIE and presses on with a policy of vilification and confrontation.

There is some distance between Israel and Washington on the Iranian nuclear question. The Likud Party would happily involve the U.S. in another war (like the Iraq war based on lies) serving Israeli interests. But Obama apparently doesn’t want another war, and worries that an attack on Iran would jeopardize the U.S. project in Iraq. That Vatican-sized embassy compound could come under attack by pro-Iranian Shiite militias; its seizure would make the Iranian “hostage crisis” of 1979-81 appear a minor historical episode.

Obama can’t say what he must surely know: that the Israeli officials’ repeated references to Iran’s nuclear program as an “existential threat” to their state, echoed by neocons and the Lobby in the U.S., is sensationalistic fear-mongering of the sort Goering spoke of. The neocons have been bellowing “Bomb Iran!” for years hoping that the Christian Zionists and bought legislators will override “the judicious study of discernable reality.”

Dennis Ross, the leading Iran hawk in the Obama administration, may have left his National Security Council post last November out of chagrin at the fact that Obama had failed to carry out the attack Ross had advocated from at least 2008. (Described by Aaron David Miller, whom he’d served with as a diplomat during the Camp David negotiations of 1999-2000, as “Israel’s lawyer,” Ross had responded to the 2007 NIE by co-authoring a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece declaring that Iran was striving to become “a nuclear state” and that leaders needed to “mobilize the power of a united American public in opposition” and send aircraft carriers into the Persian Gulf. He has long advocated crippling economic sanctions on Iran, precisely to provoke actions that might be used to justify a U.S.-Israeli attack.)

Still, Obama has acceded to the fundamental demand of the anti-Iran war-mongers: he has refused to respect the judgment of his own intelligence apparatus and relentlessly stepped up sanctions against Iran, arm-twisting allies to join in taking actions that many western legal scholars agree constitute acts of war. He does so ostensibly to derail a nuclear weapons program, but that is not the real reason. Nor is it because he believes that Iran truly constitutes an “existential threat” to Israel, which has its own 300 nukes. If he’s done his homework, he knows that the Iranian regime is not even an “existential threat” to Iranian Jews.

Doesn’t Iran have the largest population of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, a community tracing its history back two and a half millennia? And isn’t that community of maybe 35,000 protected by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa of 1979 and by representation in the Majlis far exceeding its numbers? (Jews are fewer than half of one percent of Iran’s population, but their one constitutionally mandated seat in the Majlis is over three percent of the total.)

Don’t synagogues operate legally (as they did, by the way, in Baathist Iraq)? And aren’t Hebrew schools funded by the Ministry of Education? Doesn’t Article 13 of the Iranian Constitution specifically allow Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians to “perform their religious rites and ceremonies, and to act according to their own canon in matters of personal affairs and religious education”? Didn’t a judge last year determine that Christians drinking wine during Communion were innocent of violating the law banning alcohol citing that article?

(When you hear the wild charge that Ahmadinejad, who has very limited power in Iran’s complex political system, is another Hitler, ask yourself how Nazi policy compared to all this? Iran is a very oppressive place, without question. But it is not the same as fascist Germany, as the hysterical Norman Podhoretz suggested in his ridiculous 2007 column, “The Case for Bombing Iran.”)

Obama and his team want to topple the regime in power in Tehran. But not primarily because it oppresses its people; this is the norm in the Middle East (and most places), and Washington (and Israel) have been comfortable enough with dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and now in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Kuwait, Bahrain… Nor because it has allegedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map.” (That was a deliberate mistranslation of Ahmadinejad’s comment to a conference in 2005, indirectly quoting Khomeini, that “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” He alluded in the same breath to the vanishing of the USSR and the regime of the Shah. He made no reference to Iran using force to make this happen.)

The real reason Washington wants regime change in Iran is that, in the most mass-based, genuine revolutionary upheaval in the modern history of the Muslim world, the Iranian people overthrew the brutal U.S.-imposed regime of the Shah in 1979. This deprived the U.S. of the services of the “Gendarme of the Gulf” serving U.S. oil interests, and intervening in Yemen (to support royalists against republicans) and Oman (to suppress a secessionist movement). It was a huge blow to Washington’s geopolitical interests, and the U.S. wants to reestablish its lost hegemony.

While there have been moments when the U.S. flirted with the mullahs who replaced the Shah (the Iran-Contra episode under Reagan, Colin Powell’s brief consideration of rapprochement in 2001-2) the neocon advocates of “regime change” have always won out.

Iran under the Shah was a virtual ally of Israel, maintaining diplomatic and military relations and supplying it with oil. Since the Islamic Revolution Iran has maintained close ties with Palestinian resistance groups (notably Hamas) and the Lebanese Shiite-based Hizbullah.  These are probably the two most popular political parties in Palestine and Lebanon respectively, but since they challenge the legitimacy of the Israeli settler-state, they are regarded by the U.S. and most of its allies as “terrorists.” Hence Iran is a “supporter of international terrorism” and its government (like those of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, etc.) should be destroyed—with no option left off the table.

The fact that there’s no evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program is an inconvenient truth. And it would surely be inconvenient for the U.S. administration to state frankly that it’s trying to topple the Iranian regime—to either please the lying Likudists and enhance Israel’s power in the region, or to re-establish Anglo-American control of Iran’s oil production. Hence the ongoing campaign against discernible reality on behalf of another Big Lie.

A lot of people alarmed by the situation have been predicting an attack on Iran since 2002, the year of George W. Bush’s infamous “axis of evil” speech and the year when the neocons huddling around Dick Cheney came to dominate foreign policy. For a couple years I was convinced a strike was imminent, only to learn that during Bush’s second term he had rejected Cheney’s advice to bomb. But the neocons remain a powerful force in policy making; they have helped insure that Obama consistently condemns a program which the experts deny exists, and ratchets up pressure on Iran to suspend uranium enrichment through economic warfare.

The signals are so contradictory. The Bomb Iran advocates, including the Israel leaders, dearly hope that increasingly crippling sanctions (along with the—apparently—Israeli-sponsored program of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists and sponsoring terrorm in the country) will provoke Iran into moves which will force a reluctant Obama administration to attack the nuclear facilities.

But as Jim Lobe of Inter-Press News observes, many “liberal hawks” who supported the Iraq War, including former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack, Princeton professor Anne- Marie Slaughter, New York Times columnist Bill Keller, former Pentagon Middle East policy chief Colin Kahl, and former CIA director Gen. Michael Hayden have recently warned of dire consequences should either the U.S. or Israel attack.  There is opposition within the foreign policy elite. But there was during the lead-up to the attack on Iraq as well.

On the other side are the Congressional leaders urging the stiffest, most provocative sanctions and even (in HR 1905) prohibiting any contact between U.S. diplomats and Iranian representatives without Congressional approval fifteen days in advance.  Presumably such contacts might derail the drive to war.

On the one hand, you have the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visiting Israel this month to meet his Israeli counterpart, in a mission former Maj.-Gen. Gideon Shefer described as one to stop Israel from attacking Iran. On the other hand you have the Pentagon requesting funding from Congress for a more powerful, bunker-busting bomb.  (Having spent $ 330 million constructing 20 “Massive Ordnance Penetrators” they need another $ 82 million to make them more destructive.)

Perhaps the best outcome of the unpredictable course of events would be a serious falling out between Israel and the U.S., such as occurred during the Suez Crisis in 1956 and the Israeli attack on the Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981. In the first, Israel, Britain and France tried to seize control of the newly nationalized Suez Canal. President Eisenhower, fearing an Arab  joined with the Soviets to demand an end to this tripartite aggression. In 1981, Ronald Reagan ordered his UN ambassador to vote with the rest of the world in condemning the utterly illegal “preventative strike.”

Since then the power of the Israel Lobby in league with politicized Christian fundamentalism and the neocon cabal have so sharply tilted U.S. policy towards Israel that a president cannot even press for a freeze on illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank without encountering a ferocious political backlash. One can’t be too hopeful about any “clean break” but it’s surely pleasant to imagine one.

Days after the attacks, Condoleeza Rice spoke vaguely about the “opportunities” they might provide. She might have said more clearly: “We can use the fear these attacks have produced among our people to get them to accept an ongoing war against Muslim countries, whom we can somehow link to the Muslims who attacked us. We can use the people’s fear to shred the Constitution, to pursuade them that losses of personal liberty are necessary for national security. We can thus augment the power of the state. We can use our new-found national unity behind an unpopular president who stole an election to bully our allies into supporting our new aggressions.” Because this is what the Bush administration proceeded to do.

Hours after 9/11 Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld scrawled a note, “Gotta go big, sweep it all in, things related and unrelated, Iraq, too?” Translation: “Let’s use these attacks to effect regime change throughout the Greater Middle East. Let’s link 9/11 to Iraq and fulfill President Bush’s dream of toppling Saddam Hussein.” In a meeting of top officials on Sept. 12, Rumsfeld, according to Richard Clarke, then Bush’s counter-terrorism advisor, “said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq.” That is to say: “We don’t need any evidence of any connection between the Afghan-based bin Laden operation and Iraq. We can strike at Iraq now, and get away with it.”

At the same meeting, according to Clarke, Bush took him aside and demanded to know whether Iraq was involved in the attacks. When Clarke explained that the professional intelligence community found no connection between the secularist Iraqi regime despised by al-Qaeda as “communist,” and the fundamentalist Sunni group feared and despised by Saddam Hussein, Bush “came back at me and said: ‘Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way.”

We all (should) recall what happened after that. In October Congress passed, with minimal debate, the USA PATRIOT Act. The very title (“Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) was designed to put a patriotic face on a massive legal text, which few legislators had bothered to read, that authorized indefinite detentions of immigrants, searches of homes and offices without owners’ or the occupants’ knowledge or permission, and searches of telephone, e-mail, and financial records without a court order. The act was renewed in 2005 and remains in effect, endorsed by the Obama administration.

Meanwhile, from late September government officials and journalists began receiving anthrax letters. Many, including John McCain and the editors of the Wall Street Journal, hinted or insisted that these must have been sent by Iraqi agents. By February 2002 the FBI had ascertained that the anthrax had been produced in a U.S. lab, and it is now clear that Iraq had no anthrax as of 2001. We do not know who was responsible for those letters. What we do know is that they were used to build fear of Iraq, and paved the way for Bush’s attack, in his State of the Union address in January 2002, on the “Axis of Evil” including Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.

It was a deliberate ploy to conflate in the minds of the people of this country vastly dissimilar Muslim targets with al-Qaeda; North Korea was no doubt thrown in to indicate that “terror” rather than Islam was the U.S. target, and to reduce Muslim objections. From that point the administration relentlessly prepared U.S. public opinion for war with Iraq.

That meant sidelining the intelligence community represented by empiricists like Clarke and establishing (in mid-2002) a super-secretive “Office of Special Plans” in the Pentagon which cherry-picked intelligence, procured through such one-time CIA assets such as Ahmad Chalabi, Ayad Allawi, and “Curveball” in Germany, to build the case for war. Vice President and chief neocon patron Dick Cheney, along with his chief of staff “Scooter” Libby (subsequently convicted in the “Plame Affair”), repeatedly visited CIA headquarters to insist that implausible evidence for Iraqi WMD and al-Qaeda links be included in intelligence reports sent to the inattentive, un-inquisitive President Bush.

Juicy pieces of this disinformation campaign (notably the sensationalistic story, almost surely produced by U.S. sources in Italy, that Iraq had attempted to procure uranium from Niger) were disseminated by collaborators in the press (most notably, Judith Miller of the New York Times) by administration officials, then cited by top officials on the weekend interview programs to promote the war cause. (The Niger documents were cited by Bush in a speech in January 2003 but immediately exposed as forgeries by Mohamed ElBaradei and the IAEA. Earlier former diplomat Joseph Wilson, sent by the CIA to Niger to investigate, had ascertained that Niger had never sold uranium to the Iraqis.) The administration backed off, but never apologized or explained, and indeed Cheney’s office sought to discredit Wilson when he went public with his story in 2003. Congress has never investigated, or determined, who forged the letters, and why.

In the wake of 9/11, the Bush regime tested the willingness of the people to accept drastic curbs on privacy rights. From January 2002 to August 2003, Adm. John Poindexter, who had been implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, was Director of the “Information Awareness Office” of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. With its logo depicting a pyramid topped by an all-seeing eye, this office sought to obtain unprecedented rights to violate rights to privacy. It was dissolved due to popular protest but what former Soviet KGB chief Yevgeny Primakov called the “Sovietization” of the U.S. continued. (Primakov stated in 2004 that Homeland Security had hired former Markus Wolf, former head of East Germany’s Stasi surveillance apparatus, as a consultant.)

For the Bush administration, 9/11 was a license to expand surveillance of U.S. citizens, to kill, and to lie on a colossal scale to justify the killing. There was (and is) a coherent philosophy behind all this. First of all, a rejection of rational objective thinking.

An unnamed Bush aide (probably Karl Rove) told the New York Times’ Ron Suskind in October 2004 that people like Suskind were “in what we call the reality-based community,” by which he meant “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.

“That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

This celebration of myth, reminiscent of the Nazi attack on rationalism and cultivation of Big Lies to attain goals — this positive advocacy of irrationality in order to manipulate a gullible public — found a ready audience. Studies of self-defined conservatives, Bush’s base, find that they’re uncomfortable with nuance. They prefer simplicity to complexity, particularly when it comes to the understanding of science, history, and politics. They are most comfortable with “us vs. them” paradigms, whether it’s them against liberal academia, the “lamestream (non-Fox) press,” scientists warning of global warming and explicating biological evolution, abortion and gay-rights advocates, or Muslims.

Neoconservatives in the Bush administration, with Rumsfeld’s deputy Paul Wolfowitz most conscipuous among them, knew they could exploit both fear and ignorance in pursuing their project: the transformation of the Middle East to enhance the position of Israel.

Step 1: Announce (as Bush did, in a well-received speech to Congress on September 20, 2001) that “the U.S. will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.” That justified the attack on the Taliban, that xenophobic Afghan Pashtun operation that (however vile) showed no interest in a global jihad, sought cordial relations with the U.S. (and was, in fact, receiving U.S. aid to eradicate opium production and being praised by Colin Powell for its success in this connection as of early 2001). No matter that the Taliban was not operationally connected to bin Laden, tolerated according to the Pashtunwali code as a guest, had probably been unaware of al-Qaeda’s plans for a U.S. attack, and was actually negotiating as Bush spoke about deporting bin Laden.

This statement was a signal that the U.S. would deliberately blur any distinctions among its widening set of targets, from the Palestinian Authority’s Yasser Arafat to the Iranian president Ahmad Rafsanjani (then cautiously pursuing a rapprochement with the U.S. that had been welcomed by Colin Powell’s State Department) to the secular/Baathist Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The message to the masses was: all these Muslims are the same. The fact that Bush was simultaneously insisting that the U.S. was not anti-Muslim did not reduce the efficacy of this campaign to tar widely dissimilar forces in the Muslim world with the same brush.

The fact is the only thing these disparate targets had in common was a hostility to Israeli occupation of Arab land and the U.S’s slavishly pro-Israel policies.

Step 2: Declare, to the the entire world, in the same September 20 speech: ”Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Clearly echoing the words of Jesus in Matthew 12:30, this statement was designed to rally people in this country around an extreme nationalist pole and to strike fear into the hearts of anyone hesitant to accept U.S. leadership after 9/11. Embattled Yemeni President Saleh has said frankly that his government’s decision to accept U.S. and advisors was determined by this threatening declaration. Just like Pakistani president Musharraf’s decision to capitulate to all U.S. demands in September 2001, including those egregiously violating his nation’s sovereignty, came after Richard Armitage of the State Department threatened to “bomb you back to the Stone Age” if Pakistan was uncooperative.

European commentators began with some alarm to describe U.S. policy and statements as “Manichaean,” that is, simplistically positing the U.S. as the force of “good” in the world versus ambient “evil.” At a European security conference in 2002, Paul Wolfowitz was asked what the administration meant by the strange term “Axis of Evil.” (Obviously Iraq, its long-time foe Iran, and North Korea did not form any sort of geopolitical or military axis!) His cryptic response: “You’re either for or against us.” The French and Germans soon decided they were not for a U.S. assault on Iraq, correctly reasoning that it was based on lies and opportunism. Hence the temporary vilification of France by the U.S. Congress and press.

9/11 did change the U.S. But not because it allowed (even in the face of demonstrations on a scale unseen since the Vietnam War) it to follow up the invasion of Afghanistan with the disastrous invasion of Iraq, resulting in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands. This is all quite normal in U.S. history. U.S. administrations have lied their way into wars from at least 1898 to the present; from the USS Maine incident to the Tonkin Gulf Incident to the threat against U.S. medical students in Grenada in 1983, use of disinformation against the U.S. public to acquire support for has been the norm.

And war, itself, is the norm. In my lifetime, the Vietnam War, the invasions of the Dominican Republic, Grenada, and Panama, the first Gulf War, the attack on Serbia, the Afghan and Iraq wars. Even the presidents who haven’t drawn the country into all-out war have felt free to deploy military force anywhere to obtain their objective (Gerald Ford attacked Cambodians in the Mayaquez Incident; Jimmy Carter attempted a raid on Iran). As H. Rap Brown once put it, “Violence is American as cherry pie.”

9/11 didn’t change this country because it produced a (continuing) wave of repression. This too is par for the course. The systematic harassment, round-up and deportation of certain immigrant and minority communities is in the tradition of the Palmer Raids during World War I and the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II. There is no qualitative change here.

But the magnitude of change — the sudden, sweeping alteration of law; the proliferation of illegal activities by government symbolized by the massive horde of documents amassed by the Vice President’s office (which Cheney has continued to refuse to submit to the National Archives in accordance with law); the expansion of the “war on terror” to include fronts in undeclared wars from the Philippines to Yemen and Somalia — this was unprecedented. It was unprecedented for a vice-president of the U.S., whose citizens have tended to prefer their wars short and successful and who ultimately rebel against indefinite commitments, to declare that the war beginning in 2001 would not end in “our lifetimes” –that is, to commit the next generation in this country to a vaguely conceived war against “terrorists” (who include, according to the State Department, anyone from radical Irish nationalists to Nepalese Maoists, to anyone using violence opposed by the world’s “greatest purveyor of violence”).

I don’t recall the weeks and months after 9/11 as a period of “America transformed,” of unity in the face of grief. For me it was a time of deepening dread.

The syrupy patriotic music played at regular intervals on cable news channels, the repeated images of the smoldering Twin Towers didn’t move me towards nationalist self-pity. I knew too much about why people around the world hate U.S. policies, aggressive wars, sanctions, support for dictators such as those deposed recently in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen. The ubiquitous U.S. flags, fluttering continuously in the background of our TV screens as if by edict, didn’t cause me to revise my assessment of the global meaning of that symbol. Indeed I thought it terrifying.

Local governments everywhere were competing to saturate neighborhoods with the flag. A type of warped patriotism, like the Nazi German variety, was being deployed perhaps as never before to drum up support for war. Most people, I suppose, had no problem with this, reasoning that it merely expressed love of country and national unity in a time of crisis. I felt differently. I kept remembering Grace Slick’s comment, in the notes to the Jefferson Airplane’s 1969 Volunteers album: “Don’t point that flag at me.”

As we drove through a Boston neighborhood, I asked a colleague of mine who had grown up in Shanghai whether she had ever seen anything like this. “Not even during the height of the Cultural Revolution,” she replied, had she ever seen such a massive propaganda campaign. Because that was what it was. When Bush in 2002 led the nation’s school children in the Pledge of Allegiance (stating, in a context of round-ups and deportations, that they believed they lived in a nation “with liberty and justice for all”) he was joining in a well-coordinated effort to inflict a certain form of aggressive nationalism on these innocents. I thought it nauseating (and was proud to later learn that my daughter in high school had refused to participate but sat quietly in her chair in protest).

Inevitably the wave of extreme chauvinism receded. When it became clear that there were no WMD in Iraq, nor any appreciable al-Qaeda ties, Bush’s ratings dropped. When what the neocons had depicted as a “cakewalk” turned into a bloody, protracted war, they dipped further. Still, he won a second term. And while an electorate weary of two wars and seeking change brought Barack Obama to power, largely due to his putative opposition to the Iraq War, it found more of the same.

The legacy of 9/11 includes the ongoing cowardice of the entire political class. Obama said he’d shut down the torture camps; he hasn’t. He said he’d end “special renditions.” He hasn’t. He claims to have withdrawn all combat troops from Iraq (pursuant to the Bush-era agreement with Baghdad). He hasn’t. He has vastly expanded the Afghan War, repeatedly attacked Pakistan, and gone to war without congressional authorization but legislators’ approval and complicity with Libya, a nation that had under Gaddafi maintained cordial ties with U.S. intelligence and corporations.

There is no glory, heroism or honor in the U.S. response to 9/11, that “day that changed America.” Only shameful opportunism, cowardly use of lethal power, and effective Goebbels-like deployment of fear.

1. A “New Chapter”?

“I want to talk about this change,” he began. (But recall how he campaigned on a “change” platform, and proceeded to continue all of Bush’s key foreign policies.) He then listed the components of this “new chapter.” “Already,” Obama declared, “we’ve done much to shift our foreign policy,” by removing “100,000 American troops and [ending] our combat mission” in Iraq. But the withdrawal of U.S. troops merely conforms to the Status of Forces Agreement signed by the Baghdad authorities and the Bush administration in December 2008, before Obama took office. It is no “shift.” 46,000 U.S. troops plus 180,000 mercenaries remain in the country. On average one U.S. soldier has died each week since the “withdrawal” nine months ago. And while the agreement specifies that all U.S. troops will withdraw by the end of 2011, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has suggested that–contrary to the agreement–“tens of thousands” of U.S. forces will remain after this year.

“In Afghanistan, we’ve broken the Taliban’s momentum,” Obama boasted. Even if this were true, it would not constitute a “shift in foreign policy.” But it’s not true; all the evidence shows the Taliban strengthening while Afghan public opinion becomes increasingly hostile towards NATO.

2. Recognition of the “Arab Spring”

Obama segued from this (bogus) “shift in our foreign policy” theme (which is basically a prettification of continued wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) to the real change he needs to address. What has changed is the mood of the Arab masses, from Morocco to the Persian Gulf. The “Arab Spring” is in fact a source of great anxiety for the U.S. and its allies (particularly Israel, which so cherished its relationship with Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak). Obama introduced this topic, oddly, by linking it to (what supporters claim to be) his signal accomplishment, the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

And after years of war against al Qaeda and its affiliates, we have dealt al Qaeda a huge blow by killing its leader, Osama bin Laden… But even before his death, al Qaeda was losing its struggle for relevance, as the overwhelming majority of people saw that the slaughter of innocents did not answer their cries for a better life. By the time we found bin Laden, al Qaeda’s agenda had come to be seen by the vast majority of the region as a dead end, and the people of the Middle East and North Africa had taken their future into their own hands.

This put the best face possible on a complex movement likely to cause Obama some headaches. He depicted it as a repudiation of al-Qaeda terrorism (as though “the vast majority of the region” had ever embraced that), rather than principally a rejection of U.S. allies and lackeys presiding over distorted economies, grotesque corruption, police-state brutality and complicity in the Zionist oppression of Palestinians. Those “taking the future in their hands” are likely to not only repudiate the unjust regimes that have fallen, but their slavish submission to U.S. pressure. The U.S. is deeply concerned that a popular government in Yemen, succeeding the regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, will cooperate less in the “war on terror” including U.S. missile strikes that have killed dozens of Yemeni civilians. Washington says Saleh should go, but wants to oversee the transition as closely as possible. The U.S. is also concerned that the Egyptian elections scheduled for September will empower the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s most popular political party (although illegal under Mubarak). Washington also looks askance at a presidential run by Mohamed ElBaradei, former IAEA head and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who in his recent memoir accused the U.S. of lying about Iraq’s (alleged) weapons of mass destruction and accused the U.S. of war crimes in Iraq.

Real change in Arab responses to Israel is a crucial concern. According to Obama, up until the current upheavals “too many leaders in the region tried to direct their people’s grievances elsewhere. The West was blamed as the source of all ills, a half-century after the end of colonialism. Antagonism toward Israel became the only acceptable outlet for political expression.” In other words, the (generally pro-U.S.) rulers sought to deflect valid protest against themselves by allowing the masses to nurture (irrational) resentments against a West no longer colonial in any sense, and antagonism towards Israel which is apparently also unfounded. One wonders how such condescending words were met with in the Middle East, where people are painfully aware of the realities of neo-colonialism and the daily humiliations to which Zionists subject Palestinians.

There is in any case no contradiction between opposing Arab regimes, Western governments’ policies, and Israel. As Anthony Shadid reported in the New York Times, “the street protests erupted [in Tunisia] when Arabs seemed more frustrated than ever, whether over rising prices and joblessness or resentment of their leaders’ support for American policies or ambivalence about Israeli campaigns in Lebanon in 2006 and Gaza in 2009.” One reason Tunisia’s Zine El Abidene Ben Ali as well as Hosni Mubarak were so unpopular was because of their cordial relations with Israel. (From the mid-90s to 2000, Tunisia was one of the very few Arab countries with de facto diplomatic relations with Israel; these were suspended at the beginning of the Second Intifada in response to popular indignation at Israeli actions. Still, Israel preferred Ben Ali to the regime that’s succeeded him. Binyamin Netanyahu’s government now complains about “the worsening of the Tunisian authorities’ and society’s attitude toward the Jewish community” while urging Tunisia’s 1,500 Jews to emigrate to Israel.) It’s not surprising that the first concrete manifestation of change in Egypt since the transitional military government took over has been the lifting of the boycott of Gaza and reopening of the Rafah crossing, following the new foreign minister’s successful brokerage of the Hamas-Fatah unity agreement. Both the U.S. and Israel have expressed concern if not alarm about these developments.

“There are times in the course of history,” Obama continued, “when the actions of ordinary citizens spark movements for change because they speak to a longing for freedom that has been building up for years. In America, think of the defiance of those patriots in Boston who refused to pay taxes to a King, or the dignity of Rosa Parks as she sat courageously in her seat. So it was in Tunisia…”

Tunisians may find such comparisons flattering. But they probably know what Obama did not mention: between 1987 and 2009, the U.S. provided $349 million in military aid to Ben Ali’s government. Just last year the Obama administration asked Congress to approve the sale 12 Sirkosky military helicopters worth $ 282 million (with GE-built engines) to Tunisia. (France, which provided almost a billion euros in aid from 2006 to 2010, has been second only to the U.S. as a provider of military aid. It supplies trainer and transport aircraft, helicopters, naval vessels, armored vehicles, artillery, small arms, and ammunition.)

“The story of this revolution, and the ones that followed, should not have come as a surprise… In too many countries, power has been concentrated in the hands of a few. ” Actually, the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have been described as only “half-revolutions,” movements still in progress (and which could be co-opted). And there have only been those two. One uprising (in Bahrain) was forcibly suppressed by 1500 Saudi-led troops (who may have been trained by the British Military Mission to the Saudi National Guard, in courses on “public order”) March 13 with barely a murmur of protest from the U.S. The U.S. called for “restraint” as U.S.-supplied Apache helicopters fired on protesters. Meanwhile the State Department denied the Saudi action was an “invasion.”

And as for “power concentrated in the hands of a few”–the top 20% of U.S. citizens control 85% of the wealth in this country. The top 1% control over 40%. A CIA study conducted last year showed income inequality in Egypt considerably less than in the U.S. (with a GINI coefficient of 34.4 as opposed to 45.0 for the U.S.). (Iran is also more equitable, with a 44.0 coefficient.) Should it come as a surprise to anyone if we have an uprising here?

3. Justification of Traditional U.S. Policy

Having validated the protests throughout North Africa and the Middle East, the president defended traditional U.S. policy in the region.

“For decades, the United States has pursued a set of core interests in the region: countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons; securing the free flow of commerce and safe-guarding the security of the region; standing up for Israel’s security and pursuing Arab-Israeli peace. We will continue to do these things, with the firm belief that America’s interests are not hostile to people’s hopes; they’re essential to them. We believe that no one benefits from a nuclear arms race in the region, or al Qaeda’s brutal attacks.”

One can only imagine how this was received on the Arab street. Countering terrorism? The “security” apparatuses throughout the region, outfitted and trained by U.S. and other western forces, have been appropriately compared to those in Eastern Europe before the fall of the Soviet-allied regimes. Do they not inflict terror on the citizenry? And what “security” has the U.S. invasion and occupation brought Iraq, where neighborhoods have been ethnically cleansed, women terrorized for violating the Islamic dress code, Christians and professionals driven into exile, five million displaced internally or forced to flee the country since the 2003 invasion?

Stopping the spread of nuclear weapons? The U.S. prevents any discussion of Israel’s “secret” nuclear weapons, while demanding that the world embrace its entirely unproven charge that Iran has a nuclear weapon’s program. (Later in the speech, Obama refers in passing to Iran’s “illicit nuclear program” although most of the world doesn’t buy that charge and ElBaradei while IAEA chief repeatedly stated that there is no scientific evidence for an Iranian nuclear weapons program.)
Securing the free flow of commerce? Imposing sanctions on Syria and before that, Iraq? Imposing programs of imperialist globalization (forcing reduction of tariffs, for example, that make local industry unable to compete with cheap Asian-made imports) as the condition for aid has exacerbated the chronic problem of high unemployment–a key grievance sparking the Arab Spring? Safe-guarding the security of the region? Many must wonder who is securing the region from U.S. attack. And who is preventing the Israelis from lashing out periodically at Lebanon and Gaza, or bombing Syria to the applause of the U.S. Congress?

Standing up for Israel’s security? What does that mean? Writing Israel a blank check as it illegally settles the West Bank, making “Arab-Israeli peace” impossible, and supporting its attacks on neighbors? The smug dishonesty of this depiction of policy must make many Arabs want to puke.

4. New U.S. Policy: To “Welcome Change”

Nevertheless, Obama continues, this noble pursuance of “U.S. core interests” is not enough.

“Yet we must acknowledge that a strategy based solely upon the narrow pursuit of these interests will not fill an empty stomach or allow someone to speak their mind. Moreover, failure to speak to the broader aspirations of ordinary people will only feed the suspicion that has festered for years that the United States pursues our interests at their expense.” Thus he both dissociates the pursuit of those interests from the support of the dictatorships under siege, and dismisses legitimate anger as “suspicion”–as though the masses were somehow confused. (One recalls the efforts of numerous “goodwill ambassadors” from Washington visiting the Middle East to “clarify” and “explain” U.S. policy, as though the natives’ hostility was all based on misunderstanding.)

So we face a historic opportunity. We have the chance to show that America values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator. There must be no doubt that the United States of America welcomes change that advances self-determination and opportunity… [I]t will be the policy of the United States to promote reform across the region, and to support transitions to democracy.

But hasn’t it long been U.S. policy to pay lip-service to “transitions to democracy” at some level of theory? Hasn’t the U.S. always trumpeted its system of “freedom and democracy” as a model for the world? (Never mind that the electoral debacle of 2000, or the PATRIOT Act reveal that the U.S. itself has abandoned such ideals) This policy of promoting reform and transition to democracy, always articulated to some degree, was especially broadcast when it became clear that the stated reasons for the Iraq invasion of 2003 were fabricated. After that the neocons in control of the Bush Administration shifted gears and argued that–embarrassing “intelligence failures” notwithstanding–the U.S. was in any case assisting a region-wide movement towards “democracy.” This was supposed to counter “Islamofascism” and the threat of terrorist attacks). But hadn’t U.S. proconsul in Baghdad stated in summer 2003 that elections in Iraq could “be destructive,” adding that while there was “no blanket rule” against democracy in Iraq, and he wasn’t “personally opposed to it,” it had to take place “in a way that takes care of our concerns” and “done very carefully”? In any case, the neocons backed off when relatively free elections brought gains to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (2005), to Hamas in Palestine (2006), and Hizbollah in Lebanon (2009).

Not only is this “policy” of supporting “democracy” in words not new, it’s questionable given its timing. Why did it take mass-based movements swelling across the Middle East to induce Obama to make this speech? He himself acknowledged, “It’s not America that put people into the streets of Tunis or Cairo.” Indeed he acknowledged “decades of accepting the world as it is in the region.” (He might have noted the U.S. helped create what it “accepted” by installing such dictators as the Shah of Iran.) But now, he adds generously, “we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be.” (Read: a chance to offer $20 billion in aid to the Arab world’s “new democracies” of Tunisia and Egypt–as the G8 just did–in an attempt to buy their affection, a chance to posture as benevolent allies of the people who’ve been there all along.)
But don’t suppose that the U.S. will end support to dictatorships anytime soon. “But our support,” Obama is careful to add, “must also extend to nations where transitions have yet to take place.” The teleological assumption that all nations will ultimately gravitate towards “democracy” as Obama understands it is here used as justification for support for the status quo. Any small pro forma step (such as the holding of elections for advisory councils in Saudi Arabia or Oman) can be depicted as “progress” justifying support, even when those councils are mere window-dressing and stop-gap measures designed to appease the people and insure positive mention in the annual U.S. State Department “human rights” reports.

5. U.S. Policy: to Order Unfriendly (or No Longer Useful) Rulers Out

“Unfortunately,” the president continued, “in too many countries, calls for change have thus far been answered by violence.” He acknowledges that the violent repression has occurred in countries both friendly and unfriendly to the U.S.:
“In Cairo, we heard the voice of the young mother who said, ‘It’s like I can finally breathe fresh air for the first time.’ In Sanaa [Yemen], we heard the students who chanted, ‘The night must come to an end.’ In Benghazi [Libya], we heard the engineer who said, ‘Our words are free now. It’s a feeling you can’t explain.’ In Damascus, we heard the young man who said, ‘After the first yelling, the first shout, you feel dignity.’”

This would seem on the surface a gracious validation of protests even in countries firmly allied with the U.S. (Egypt, since the 1970s, and Yemen, one more tentatively aligned, bullied into a relationship to root out al-Qaeda since 2001). These are listed alongside Libya, historically antagonistic, but friendly and cooperative since 2003; and Syria, described as “terror supporting” by Washington due to its support for Hizbollah and Hamas. The point is: we’re moved by the people’s protest in all of them.

But in the Egyptian case, Washington stood with Mubarak up to the last minute. Joe Biden refused to even call the Egyptian president a “dictator.” Indeed he called him a longstanding ally of the U.S. and Israel. The U.S. has called upon Yemen’s president to leave office, but not very loudly, and only in order to speed up a “transition” to another leader who will maintain a relationship universally unpopular with Yemenis. In Libya, the U.S. has backed a complex opposition movement (without even, by the admission of top officials, understanding its composition, which likely includes pro-al-Qaeda forces) with ferocious violence, largely due to French, British and Italian prodding. In Syria, while maintaining the traditional disparagement of the Assad family, it has stopped short of demanding Bashir Assad’s ouster (largely because Israel doesn’t see a better negotiating partner on the horizon). “President Assad,” lectured Obama, “now has a choice: He can lead that transition, or get out of the way.” (How generous to allow the Syrian leader the prospect of survival!)

Libya’s leader Muammar Qaddafi is another matter. He is, according to Obama, the “most extreme example” of a dictator, who would have slaughtered the people of Benghazi had the west not intervened. But the casualties of the Libyan uprising (really, a civil war with armed combatants on both sides) were apparently in the hundreds at the time that French president Sarkozy began insisting on western military intervention in March. And Libyan government forces have not engaged in wholesale slaughter since (even when deployed against what is now a rival army). If Qaddafi is a bloody dictator, he is no more “an extreme example” of such than Ali Saleh or Bashir Assad. He is merely depicted as such to justify the U.S. “join[ing in] an international coalition to intervene.”

In his speech Obama had to say something about Bahrain, knowing that many are noting the apparent hypocrisy involved in the U.S. bombing Libya to “help” people in rebellion while standing aside as the al-Khalifa family slaughters demonstrators in Manama. Making no reference to the Saudi-GCC troops, he simply declared, “Bahrain is a longstanding partner, and we are committed to its security. We recognize that Iran has tried to take advantage of the turmoil there, and that the Bahraini government has a legitimate interest in the rule of law. Nevertheless, we have insisted both publicly and privately that mass arrests and brute force are at odds with the universal rights of Bahrain’s citizens, and we will — and such steps will not make legitimate calls for reform go away. The only way forward is for the government and opposition to engage in a dialogue, and you can’t have a real dialogue when parts of the peaceful opposition are in jail. (Applause.) The government must create the conditions for dialogue, and the opposition must participate to forge a just future for all Bahrainis.”

But after this litany of criticisms of friends and foes alike, Obama adds, “we cannot prevent every injustice perpetrated by a regime against its people, and we have learned from our experience in Iraq just how costly and difficult it is to try to impose regime change by force — no matter how well-intentioned it may be.” Thus he keeps all options open. If people ask, “Why not establish a no-fly zone over Bahrain, or Yemen, or Syria, too?” he can say, “There’s only so much we can do…”

6. Iran Remains Evil

Obama made it clear that Iran (the only non-Arab Middle Eastern state he mentioned) is the worst problem in the region. It has abetted the crackdown on protesters in Syria, “tak[ing] advantage of the turmoil there.” It has encouraged the Shiite majority in Bahrain to rise up. (Why shouldn’t it, if the U.S. is now saying it “hears the voices” of the protesters?) It has suppressed peaceful protests at home. It has an “illicit” nuclear program. There will be no change in U.S. relations with Iran.

7. Israel Remains a Dear Friend

Finally, Obama turned to Israel, and to “another cornerstone of our approach to the region, [which] relates to the pursuit of peace.” (That is, another cornerstone along with “countering terrorism and stopping the spread of nuclear weapons [and] securing the free flow of commerce and safe-guarding the security of the region”–from someone presumably threatening it.)

For decades, the conflict between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could be blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them.

Of course, most analysts of the Middle East recognize that the single biggest regional problem is the problem of Palestine. It would have been nice if Obama had reviewed the history.

In 1948 700,000 refugees were created as recent settlers, overwhelmingly from Europe, carved out a state for themselves by force. The settlers could claim some sort of legitimacy, on the basis of the UN plan for Jewish-Arab partition submitted the year before. That plan was supported by just 54% of then-UN members. (The settlers could even have cited the 1922 League of Nations plan for a Jewish state including Samaria and Galilee, which Israeli lawyers are mentioning in their response to Palestinians’ efforts to win UN acceptance of Palestinian statehood.) But during the 1948 war they obtained far more land than apportioned in the UN plan. Jews, then 33% of the population of Palestine, were given 56% of the land by the 1947 plan. This was rejected by the entire Arab world (as well as Iran, Pakistan, India, Ethiopia, Greece, and Cuba) as unfair. After the settlers began seizing by force even lands accorded the Palestinians—committing atrocities in Deir Yassin in April 1948 and elsewhere–Egypt and Syria intervened. The Arabs were defeated, as 80% of the Palestinian population fled, and Zionist settlers wound up with both the land allotted them in the UN plan–plus 60% of that which had been allotted the Palestinians. This is what we call “the 1967 borders.” Most states if only for pragmatic reasons have come to recognize it as the legitimate state of Israel. But many people around the world question its legitimacy given the brutal manner through which it was created.

In 1967, Israel struck at Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, claiming a “pre-emptive” war was necessary to prevent an Egyptian attack. But as Israeli Defense Force chief-of-staff Yitzak Rabin himself recognized, the Egyptian troop movements depicted as a casus belli were in fact defensive in nature. (One recalls the German invasion of Poland in 1939, to prevent a Polish invasion of the Reich; or the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, to prevent a “mushroom cloud over New York City.) In any event, the Israelis easily completed their conquest of Palestine, seizing the West Bank from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt (along with the Sinai Peninsula) and the Golan Heights from Syria. (The Sinai was returned to Egypt as part of a peace agreement in 1979.) The UN has consistently condemned the Israeli occupation of these lands, while the Zionists claim they must remain under occupation for defensive reasons–and/or because God anointed the Jews as His Chosen People and gave them the Promised Land (so no normal, this-worldly, rational discussion of Palestinian rights is necessary).

So far as the latter argument is concerned, the Zionists are shrewdly aware that fundamentalist Christians in the U.S. (whose religious viewpoints they find absurd) are their best allies. Obama as a savvy U.S. politician must thus always privilege Israeli pain and fear, avoiding the issue of why there has been so much hatred of the settler-state from its inception.

“…the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them.” What should Arab children be taught? The Zionist version of history, according to which Palestinians left of their own volition–needlessly and foolishly–in 1948, coaxed by anti-Semitic Arab leaders, and that in so doing they forever relinquished their right to return? That the Palestinians aren’t really indigenous to Palestine, but rather that modern Jews (in fact a complex gene pool with dubious relation to the Judeans affected by the Diaspora nineteen centuries ago) have an inherent right to obliterate Arab towns to revive some dream of an ancient kingdom, claiming it’s their “birthright” to do so?

“For Palestinians,” the president conceded, in an attempt to appear the sensitive, honest broker, the Arab-Israel conflict “has meant suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own… For over two years, my administration has worked with the parties and the international community to end this conflict, building on decades of work by previous administrations.”

The fact is, Obama soon after becoming president politely requested that Israel freeze settlement activity on the West Bank, where over 270,000 Israeli Jews have settled illegally since 1967. “”He wants to see a stop to settlements,” declared Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in May 2009. “Not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions.” That was a simple call to obey international law, and repeated UN resolutions. It was also a plea to make U.S.-assisted negotiations with the Palestinians–long frozen due to precisely this issue–possible. But Obama’s stance produced intensely hostile reactions from the Israel Lobby and many U.S. politicians, who accused him of “betraying” the Jewish state, which in their minds ought to be spared any pressure or criticism while the U.S. subsidizes it to the tune of $ 3 million per year.

The Israeli government headed by Binyamin Netanyahu ignored the request, and indeed used the occasion of U.S. officials’ visits to announce the expansion of the settlements, even angering such longtime supporters of Israel as Vice President Joe Biden. In the end (September 2009), Obama blinked. “It’s time to move on,” he declared, raising the question how peace talks can move on when one side massively supported (and rapturously eulogized) by his administration insists on undermining any premise for their continuation. There has been no interruption of U.S. aid as the settlers with widespread support among the Israeli public relentlessly expand, making the “two-state solution” promoted by the U.S. impossible.

Obama did note in passing: “Yet expectations have gone unmet. Israeli settlement activity continues.”

(He might have added, “…with tacit U.S. support. My own administration, having publicly demanded that Israel freeze settlement expansion, was met with a firm ‘No’ from Mr. Netanyahu and indeed humiliated. Still, we continue the flow of aid to the Jewish State and assist and protect the settlement program in other ways. For example, when the UNSC last February moved to pass a resolution condemning the illegal Israeli settlements in occupied territories and demanded an immediate halt to all settlement building–a resolution supported by all the other 14 other Security Council and indeed, reflecting official U.S. policy–I had Ambassador Susan Rice veto it. As she said at the time, while my administration agrees with the entire world ‘about the folly and illegitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity,’ we considered it ‘unwise’ for the U.N. to attempt to resolve key issues between the Israelis and Palestinians.”)

When the U.S. wants legitimacy for attacks on Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya it seeks UN approval. But Israel must always be protected from UN judgments by U.S. vetoes. The unfairness and hyprocrisy offends Arabs everywhere, and (again) one reason Tunisia’s Ben Ali as well as Hosni Mubarak were so unpopular was because of their cordial relations with Israel. (From the mid-90s to 2000, Tunisia was one of the very few Arab countries with de facto diplomatic relations with Israel; these were suspended at the beginning of the Second Intifada in response to popular indignation at Israeli actions. Still, Israel preferred Ben Ali to the regime that’s succeeded him. Binyamin Netanyahu’s government now complains about “the worsening of the Tunisian authorities’ and society’s attitude toward the Jewish community” while urging Tunisia’s 1,500 Jews to emigrate to Israel.)

“Palestinians have walked away from talks.” (Obama might have added, “…in protest of the Israelis’ refusal to stop their illegal settlements on Palestinian land, in accordance with the basic agreements that paved the way to the ‘peace process’ in the first place.”)

“The world looks at a conflict that has grinded on and on and on, and sees nothing but stalemate. Indeed, there are those who argue that with all the change and uncertainty in the region, it is simply not possible to move forward now. I disagree. At a time when the people of the Middle East and North Africa are casting off the burdens of the past, the drive for a lasting peace that ends the conflict and resolves all claims is more urgent than ever. That’s certainly true for the two parties involved. For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure.”

In other words, even if you think that the settler-state was created by terror (as some Jewish Israeli historians acknowledge) it is “legitimate.” It is not a matter of opinion, like one’s view of (say) South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Kosovo or Northern Cyprus. The U.S. with Israel demands that all accept that legitimacy (or be accused to “teaching hatred” to their children).

“Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state.”

In other words, even having realized that Israel isn’t serious about ever withdrawing from the West Bank, and that the U.S. is unwilling to challenge Israel’s inexorable expansion, the Palestinian Authority should abandon their recent move (an act of desperation, really) to acquire UN recognition for a Palestinian state. No matter that practically every other country except the U.S. is sympathetic to this idea, and it has been endorsed by the Arab League and a number of Latin American and European countries. The world is exasperated with Israeli intransigence. If UN recognition won’t confer de facto sovereignty on the occupied territories, it will at least, as Obama fears, further isolate a country already the object of countless UN resolutions condemning its actions. In most cases, the U.S. ambassador was the only one to abstain, and of course in many instances the only one to veto a resolution. In any case, the Palestinian’s immediate objective is indeed to isolate Israel, while the U.S. insists (almost as a religious cause) to shield it from international condemnation.

“Palestinian leaders will not achieve peace or prosperity if Hamas insists on a path of terror and rejection. And Palestinians will never realize their independence by denying the right of Israel to exist.”

Hamas, the popular political party that overwhelmingly won the 2008 Palestinian election, has in fact committed to and observed repeated cease-fires, deliberately broken by Israel. It has even indicated its willingness to accept a Palestinian state outside Israel’s 1967 borders. Israel has responded by punishing the people on the Gaza Strip for voting Hamas into office by creating what the Vatican’s foreign minister has called a “big concentration camp.” Hamas might be considered a “terrorist” organization by the U.S. State Department, which maintains an entirely arbitrary list of such groups, and it may have pressured the E.U. after many years to accept this definition, but such nations as Russia, Turkey, and Switzerland disagree, and the UN does not accept the categorization. Fatah for its part has indeed accepted Israel’s right to exist, although Netanyahu has upped the ante by insisting that everyone in the world accept Israel, which is 75% Jewish, and with an inevitably growing non-Jewish population, as a “Jewish state.” (This is code for saying we must all accept that Israel must always be 51% or more Jewish–rather like asking the world to agree to U.S. must always have a white majority. There is no way Palestinians can accept that, and that is the point: to make negotiations for peace, and for two states, impossible.)

“As for Israel, our friendship is rooted deeply in a shared history and shared values.”

What does this mean? That U.S. citizens, like Israelis, are overwhelmingly of European background? That is certainly true. Shared values? An apparent allusion to the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Ten Commandments etc. But Islam grew out of that tradition, too. Islamic civilization gave Americans, Israeli Jews and the entire world an extraordinary cultural legacy including algebra, while some of the greatest Jewish thinkers such as Maimonides (1135-1204) flourished in the Arab world. The “values” of (most) Christians and Jews anywhere are possibly more similar to those of (most) Muslims than to those of adherents of non-“Abrahamic” religions.

But do “we” really share Israeli values? There is a shocking amount of racism in Israeli society. There is here too, but do half of our school children disdain to study alongside people of an ethnic group other than their own? One poll, taken by Tel Aviv University researchers last year, found that 49.5% of Israeli Jewish high school students want to deny Israeli Arabs the same rights as Jews enjoy. A 2007 poll by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel showed that two-thirds of Israeli teens believe Arabs to be “less intelligent, uncultured and violent.” 50% of Israelis responding to the poll said they would not live in the same building as Arabs, and would not befriend, or allow their children to befriend Arabs or let Arabs into their homes. Does the first African-American president sincerely believe we’re so similar?

“Our commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable. And we will stand against attempts to single it out for criticism in international forums.” Why, one must ask, when virtually nobody else–including those sincerely committed to Israel’s security–stands against criticism when criticism’s due?

Obama concluded, “Precisely because of our friendship, it’s important that we tell the truth: The status quo is unsustainable, and Israel too must act boldly to advance a lasting peace…. The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.” (The one nice thing about this passage is that it implies that Israeli democracy remains a dream, not an obtained reality. But that’s probably a slip-up on the president’s part. I can imagine him answering a press conference question: “Certainly I didn’t mean to question the fact that Israel’s a democracy, indeed, the only democracy in the Middle East…” because this is an article of faith among the U.S. political class that must never be questioned.)

“Now, ultimately, it is up to the Israelis and Palestinians to take action. No peace can be imposed upon them — not by the United States; not by anybody else.” (Wouldn’t it be best to add: “I could try to cut off some aid to you, but my hands are tied by the Lobby?”)

Then came the “controversial” sentence:

The United States believes that negotiations should result in two states, with permanent Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt, and permanent Israeli borders with Palestine. We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps, so that secure and recognized borders are established for both states.

This is of course consistent U.S. policy, but has not been stated so clearly in recent years, and in the context of a “major policy speech” seems a signal that Obama wants to assert it more vigorously. The Arab Spring, by denying Israel its Egyptian partner Hosni Mubarak, has changed the situation. (Should anyone doubt the intimacy of Mubarak and the Israel elite, one of his last phone calls immediately before resigning his post was to Israeli Knesset member Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, to whom he complained about the “misguided” U.S. support for “democracy.”)

Obama asserted, “The Palestinian people must have the right to govern themselves, and reach their full potential, in a sovereign and contiguous state.” But he added it must be a “non-militarized state.” In other words, Israel can remain a nuclear state, with 190,000 soldiers active duty and over half a million reservists. But to protect its security, its future, theoretical neighboring state must be the only non-militarized state in Europe, Africa or Asia (outside of Liechtenstein, pop. 35,000, and Vatican City).

The president deplored what the new regime in Egypt and people throughout the Arab world in flux have welcomed: the agreement between Fatah and Hamas. This “raises,” according to Obama, “profound and legitimate questions for Israel: How can one negotiate with a party that has shown itself unwilling to recognize your right to exist?”

One might as well ask: How can Palestinians negotiate with a party that has shown its hostility to the concept of a Palestinian state, with all normal features of a state, that makes excuses at every interval to avoid negotiations while creating “facts on the ground,” that continuously relies on religious mythology to press its claims and generate sympathy among the U.S. electorate, and spends hundreds of millions to buy Congressmen’s support? Israel’s ruling Likud Party does not recognize Palestine’s right to exist as an independent state.

Towards the end of the speech, in another effort to appear the honest broker, Obama said the following: “But I’m convinced that the majority of Israelis and Palestinians would rather look to the future than be trapped in the past. We see that spirit in the Israeli father whose son was killed by Hamas, who helped start an organization that brought together Israelis and Palestinians who had lost loved ones. That father said, ‘I gradually realized that the only hope for progress was to recognize the face of the conflict.’ We see it in the actions of a Palestinian who lost three daughters to Israeli shells in Gaza. ‘I have the right to feel angry,’ he said. ‘So many people were expecting me to hate. My answer to them is I shall not hate. Let us hope,’ he said, ‘for tomorrow.’”

Does he not recall that the entire U.S. political class while routinely denouncing Hamas as terrorist killers, positively cheered on the 2008-2009 Israeli blitzkrieg against Gaza? And that at the time as president-elect he said nothing?

Finally: “There’s no straight line to progress, and hardship always accompanies a season of hope. But the United States of America was founded on the belief that people should govern themselves.”

Hope again! Hope and change! And delusion!

The U.S.A. was founded by white planters and merchants who believed that some people should govern themselves. They by and large believed they themselves had a right to enslave certain others, and to remove native peoples beyond the Mississippi. The U.S. has always been ruled by men who deny others the right to govern themselves, whether in annexed regions of Mexico (1840s), or Hawai’i (1898), or the Philippines (1898), or the Caribbean (1898, etc.), or Iran (1954), or Vietnam… the list is endless. The policy of “promoting reform” is just a cover for more intervention, and more sabotaging of hopes. The people of the Middle East can have little hope for change in U.S. policy.

Their first instinct, as public squares filled with protesters demanding change, was to support and pay tribute to their long-time friends who were suddenly under siege. On January 12, French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, fresh from a Tunisian vacation in December, offered Tunisia’s President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali assistance as the protests grew. She suggested that French police train the Tunisian police because the “skills, recognized around the world, of our security forces allow us to resolve security situations of this type.” Even as human rights groups reported fifty dead, French Agriculture Minister Bruno Le Maire declared, “President Ben Ali is often judged unfairly, he’s done a lot of good things for his country.” As Tunisia’s former colonial ruler and largest trading partner, France had been more than satisfied with Ben Ali’s performance during his 23 years in power. So had Italy, Tunisia’s second largest trading partner. (SISMI, the Italian military secret service, had helped bring him to power in 1987 through what SISMI former head Fulvio Martini later called “a kind of golpe.”) So had Britain, whose special trade representative, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, had been wined and dined just last year by Ben Ali’s extended family including some now under investigation for money laundering.

The U.S. State Department, which had counted Ben Ali a key ally in the War on Terror, responded with caution. On January 7 it issued a statement calling on “all parties to show restraint as citizens exercise their right of public assembly.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told Al Arabiya on Jan. 11 that the U.S. was “not taking sides” in Tunisia but said, “we are worried, in general, about the unrest and the instability, and what seems to be the underlying concerns of the people who are protesting.”

Only on Jan. 13 did Paris begin to see the handwriting on the wall, and the need to distance itself from its longtime ally. It condemned Ben Ali’s “disproportionate use of force,” a few days later abandoning him and even banning him from France. President Sarkozy started thinking seriously about how to engage this new situation, siding (for appearances sake) with the people. Meanwhile on January 14, the day that Ben Ali fled the country, President Obama finally announced, “I condemn and deplore the use of violence against citizens peacefully voicing their opinion in Tunisia, and I applaud the courage and dignity of the Tunisian people.” He followed up two weeks later with words of praise for the protesters in his State of the Union address, referring to the “desire to be free in Tunisia, where the will of the people proved more powerful than the writ of a dictator…. The United States of America stands with the people of Tunisia and supports the democratic aspirations of all people.”

This almost gives the impression that the U.S. had been supporting the people all along. But as French Defense Minister Alain Juppé noted matter-of-factly: “Every, let us say Western country … European and American, has considered Tunisia to be a politically stable country developing economically. … Doubtless, we have all underestimated the degree of exasperation of public opinion faced with a dictatorial police state. … I would like someone to name one big American or European government which, before the events in Tunisia sought the departure of Ben Ali.” They were all on his side, which is to say, opposing the democratic aspirations of the Tunisian people.

The Tunisian revolt soon inspired mass demonstrations in Egypt resulting in the fall of Hosni Mubarak February 11. During that brief interval U.S. leaders heaped praise on the longtime Egyptian president. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed the Egyptian government “stable.” She added on January 25 that “Our assessment is that the Egyptian government is… looking for ways to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people.” Vice President Joe Biden told an interviewer January 27, “Look, Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things. And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East peace efforts; the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing relationship with Israel.” Asked if he considered the Egyptian a dictator, Biden squirmed momentarily then said, “I think that it would be — I would not refer to him as a dictator.” Both, as well as President Obama, urged “dialogue” between the protesters and the regime — as though they were equally legitimate and morally comparable. They just didn’t get it. The youth on the streets were not interested in dialogue with a murderer.

When Mubarak did leave office, Obama had this to say: “We are witnessing history unfold. It is a moment of transformation that’s taking place because the people of Egypt are calling for change. They’ve turned out in extraordinary number representing all ages and all walks of life, but its young people who have been at the forefront. A new generation, your generation who want their voices to be heard, and so going forward we want those young people and all Egyptians to know America will continue to do everything we can to support an orderly and genuine transition to democracy in Egypt.”

“We will continue to do everything we can.” As though the U.S. had been promoting “genuine democracy” in Egypt for ages! This response, like Obama’s response to the events in Tunisia, was sheer opportunism, praising Egypt’s youth—merely to pose as its natural ally in the future, even though U.S.-supplied munitions had killed and injured many of them in the previous weeks.

But what else could Obama say? He couldn’t confess, “We’ve observed with great concern the fall of our dear friend Hosni Mubarak, whom we’ve supplied with $ 2 billion every year since 1979, when his predecessor signed the Camp David accords with Israel. We and our intimate allies, the Israelis, who loved Mubarak for his harsh stance against the Palestinians and support for the maintenance of the blockade of Gaza, are deeply worried that Egypt might make a break with U.S. geopolitical policy, like Iran did after the revolution of 1979 or Turkey has done in recent years.” But that’s what he was probably thinking.

Assessing an historical tide, he needs to ride it, or try to, making the best of a troubling situation. Meanwhile his consternated and divided State Department and Defense Department have tried to figure out how to handle this wave of Arab uprisings. On the one hand, the dictators had been extremely good business partners, in terms of enlisting in the “war on terrorism,” delivering oil, keeping the Suez Canal open (even to Israeli military vessels) and in backing the (illusory) “Middle East peace process” stymied forever by the Zionist settler movement. And those remaining in power need to know (or think) that Washington’s a reliable ally. On the other hand, the U.S. was on record as pleading for greater “democracy” in the Middle East. That plea had never been sincere. But it has, from time to time, been articulated as a U.S. goal for the region, especially since 2003. By advocating, as a mere ploy and distraction, what the Arab masses now demand, Washington may have painted itself into a corner.

The Neocons and “Democracy” in the Middle East

By mid-2003, as it became clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the war had been based on lies, the neoconservatives who had insisted on the invasion and (through the Pentagon’s “Office of Special Plans”) produced the package of disinformation that had justified it, shifted gears. They began to argue that — whatever “intelligence flaws” might have had preceded the war and occupation — it was all worth it to “overthrow a dictator” and support the cause of “democracy” in the Middle East. This became the retrospective cause. But the neocons didn’t just make the case themselves in the Weekly Standard and National Review.

Just as they’d skillfully used Colin Powell, the first black Secretary of State, to deliver their bogus case for war to the United Nations, the neocons now dictated the script for Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor. Who better to deliver it than a black woman from Birmingham, Alabama? In August, speaking before the Association of Black Journalists, she redefined the purpose of the War on Terror and its relentless pursuit of “regime change” in what the neocons call “the Greater Middle East.” Affecting a righteous, moral tone, she declared:

…we should not let our voice waver in speaking out on the side of people who are seeking freedom. And we must never, ever indulge in the condescending voices who allege that some people in Africa or in the Middle East are just not interested in freedom, they’re culturally just not ready for freedom or they just aren’t ready for freedom’s responsibilities. We’ve heard that argument before, and we, more than any, as a people, should be ready to reject it. The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East.

This effort to conflate the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq with the Civil Rights Movement reminds one of Ronald Reagan’s declaration that the Mujahadeen fighting the Soviets and their allies in Afghanistan in the ‘80s were the “moral equivalent of our founding fathers.”

Margaret Kimberley in the Black Commentator called this “a little gem of self-serving hypocrisy,” noting the straw man argument. (Nobody had opposed the Iraq War because they thought Iraqis weren’t interested in “freedom.”) And hadn’t Paul Bremer, U.S. procurator in occupied Iraq, stated in June that, “I’m not opposed to [self-rule], but I want to do it a way that takes care of our concerns… In a postwar situation like this, if you start holding elections, the people who are rejectionists tend to win… It’s often the best-organized who win, and the best-organized right now are the former Baathists and to some extent the Islamists.” Weren’t elections first held in occupied Iraq (skewed by the exclusion of the Baathists) held only because Shiite groups inspired by Ayatollah Sistani were demanding them and embarrassing Bremer?

But this notion that the U.S. stood for freedom and democracy became the fig-leaf for the war. Bush could boast that “two new democracies” had been created by his policies. And some puzzled by the “intelligence failures” and all the problems attending the occupation could conclude: “Well, at least we brought democracy.” The neocons dominating the administration encouraged this. It was an effort to recast their effort to transform the Middle East in the interests of Israel (and of western oil companies) as a great moral endeavor.

The Bush administration produced something called the “Greater Middle East Initiative” in 2004 to promote economic, political and cultural reform. According to the (London) Sunday Times, “when Arab nations saw a leaked copy of the plan, they were incensed and viewed it as another condescending imposition of American values without their prior consultation.” But bowing to U.S. pressure, some regimes indeed allowed partly “free” elections.

In the Lebanese local election in August 2005 the Hezbollah-Amal alliance won all 17 of the contested seats in the south by a wide margin. In what AP called “the first U.S. response to the voting,” Bush press secretary Scott McClellan simply commented, “Hezbollah, as you are well aware, is a terrorist organization.” In the Egyptian parliamentary election in 2005, parties enjoyed “unprecedented freedom” to campaign. The Muslim Brotherhood won 20% of the votes, forming the largest opposition bloc. Washington was not pleased. The neocons in particular were dismayed that such limited exercises in democracy were threatening to their main cause and passion: Israel.

When the Palestinian Authority held the first free, internationally monitored elections in January 2006, Hamas scored a “stunning victory” over the (now mainstream, U.S.-backed) Fatah. The U.S. and its allies responded by boycotting the new government and in 2007 supporting a Fatah coup attempt in Gaza that resulted instead in a strengthening of Hamas. So much for “supporting democracy.” Washington was all for people having the right to vote, so long as they vote for the right people who aren’t to hostile to Israel.

Washington’s all for freedom of speech and assembly, until they threaten close U.S. allies. The other day (April 28) the U.S. ambassador to Yemen cautioned protesters to avoid “all provocative demonstrations, marches, and speeches in the coming days.” Simmer down! he’s telling those seeking to topple Ali Saleh. They may well wonder why they should, while western governments contemplate arming the Libyan opposition.

Various reports early this month indicated that Hillary Clinton approved the Saudi intervention in Bahrain to crush pro-democracy protests in exchange for the Saudi-engineered Arab League vote in support of the Franco-British-U.S./NATO bombing of Libya. What exchange better illusrates western hypocrisy? In Bahrain, which hosts the Fifth Fleet, the protests were a headache. Clinton had in December 2010 called the monarchy a “model partner” with the U.S. “I am impressed,” she oozed, “by the commitment that the government has to the democratic path that Bahrain is walking on. It takes time; we know that from our own experience. There are obstacles and difficulties along the way. But America will continue working with you to promote a vigorous civil society and to ensure that democracy, human rights and civil liberties are protected by the rule of law.”

Five protesters dead as of Feb. 17 in Bahrain, over 50 missing as of March 22. The Internet shut down. But America keeps “working with” King Hamad bin Isa Al-Khalifa, who has miniscule support in his Shia-majority country, while launching an assault of Libya’s Gaddafi, who has a significant social base. It doesn’t make any logical sense, and there’s no consistent moral compass applied here.

The (Selective) Assault on Libya

Franklin Delano Roosevelt said to have said of the Nicaraguan dictator Samoza, “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” Ben Ali, Mubarak, Al-Khalifa, and Yemen’s Ali Saleh are all U.S. sons of bitches, supported until their people rise up in such strength that it becomes impossible to maintain the embrace. But Gaddafi, however cooperative with the western powers since 2003, when he abandoned his WMD programs and signed numerous agreements with western powers, isn’t “ours.” Yes, he became cozy with Blair, Sarkozy, and Berlusconi, and referred to Obama affectionately as his “son” (i.e., a son of Africa, over which he sometimes, in his weird fashion, proclaimed himself “king of kings”). He curtailed North African emigration to Europe at his partners’ request. He entertained Tony Blair, and consulted with the odious neocon Richard Perle (twice) in Tripoli. But he will always be labeled as the Lockerbie bomber, the friend of Fidel Castro, and Hugo Chavez, the opponent of the “two-state solution,” the weird tent-dweller.

After the fall of Bin Ali and Mubarak, and as protests swelled in Bahrain and Yemen, western leaders perceived that an historical sea change had begun. Regrettable, indeed, to see friends and allies under siege. But how to profit from this new situation? How to find opportunity in it?

While Obama dithered, the French president took swift action. Gaddafi’s a goner, he smugly assumed. And so here was Sarkozy’s opportunity to revive his sagging poll numbers and assert the grandeur of France. France, with its historical (colonial) ties to North Africa, could take the lead in assisting the Libyan opposition in deposing a tyrant, and then boast of its influence and positive image in the Arab world. But France couldn’t do it alone. It needed U.S. fire power. To get that it needed to pull together an alliance of European countries to put pressure on a hesitant Obama administration. Germany and Turkey balked, but Britain and Italy (which governed Libya as colonial power from 1912 to 1947) liked the concept.

Prime Minister Cameron and Sarkozy lobbied the White House. As a civil war erupted in February, and Gaddafi used troops against rebels, they made a big fuss about the Libyan using armed force against his own people! (As though this was something unusual. Didn’t Sarkozy as French interior minister in 2005 call out 17 riot police divisions to suppress what he called the “scum” — racaille — immigrant youth from North Africa, in the Parisian banlieue?) To prevent a bloodbath, they argued, international intervention was necessary. In fact, casualties as of early March had been light in the Libyan strife, surely no larger than those in Bahrain and Yemen. But urgent “humanitarian” action was necessary! The bombing began March 19.

Now after more than six weeks of missile attacks on behalf of the (still largely unknown) Benghazi-based opposition forces, journalists and military commentators are using words like “ineptitude” for the western-backed forces and “stalemate” for the military situation. Surprise, surprise! All Arab countries are not the same, following the same necessary trajectory. Libya is different from Tunisia or Egypt, and those thinking they can use its crisis to serve their own (imperialist) ends, and emerge at the end of the day as heros of the Arab masses, are maybe deluding themselves. Yes, there are crowds in Benghazi who’ve chanted “Sarkozy, Sarkozy!” and that may make the French president smile. But there are other crowds wanting his head.

Sarkozy has said in reference to the demonstrations in Syria: “Every ruler should understand, and especially every Arab ruler should understand that the reaction of the international community and of Europe will from this moment on each time be the same: we will be on the side of peaceful protesters who must not be repressed with violence.” Just like Obama stands with the people of Tunisia and will continue to support democratic change in Egypt! But the west has not stood with the peaceful demonstrators of Bahrain, home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet. It has ignored the protesters in Yemen, whose dictator of 40 years has the blood of hundreds of demonstrators on his hands. Why no call for no-fly zones over those countries?

Cartoonist GB Trudeau in a recent Doonesbury strip said it all. He depicts the president conferring with advisors in the White House. “Tunisia and especially Egypt are done deals,” he says. “Mubarak was obviously on the wrong side of history. The demonstrators caused peaceful change — a clean win. Unlike in Libya, where the demonstrators took up arms. But the United States — and History — do not look favorably on tyrants who murder their own people… Unless they do it in Bahrain and Yemen and kill them in acceptably low numbers. History gives such regimes a pass. As it does in Iraq. Although not in Iran, whose protestors we support, unlike those in Pakistan, who obviously don’t understand history.” Someone interrupts to report rioting in Paris, and someone else asks “What side of History are…?” while Sarkozy begs for help.

The strip illustrates the conundrum: how do you maintain your pretense of supporting democracy, while siding as a rule with oppressors? You can appeal to an hypostasized “History,” and describe your friends are always conforming to “the side of History,” heading ever onwards. And you can depict your foes as doomed warriors for some sort of evil past. But “History” as Marx once said (and it bears endless repeating) “does nothing; it does not possess immense riches, it does not fight battles. It is men, real, living, who do all this.” There is no inevitability, surely not towards Obama or Sarkozy’s notion of a better world, as opposed to Mubarak’s or Gaddafi’s or Assad’s. There is just the penchant of people to rebel against oppression, and the tendency of rulers to cluelessly respond.

The passage is indeed routine. On April 28, 1986 the Enterprise voyaged from the Indian Ocean through the Red Sea and canal into the Mediterranean in order to support “Operation Eldorado Canyon.” In that operation, U.S. aircraft repeatedly entered the airspace over the Gulf of Sidra, which Libya claimed as its territorial waters, challenging Gadafy’s “Line of Defense.” (This was before Gadafy decided to kiss up to the U.S. and other imperialist powers.) They deliberately provoked a confrontation and killed 56 Libyans including Gadafy’s 18 month old daughter.

The USS John F. Kennedy (CV 67) was sent to the Red Sea in support of Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1991. Aircraft carriers including the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69) regularly ply the waters of the Red Sea and pass through the canal, projecting power and “maintaining security.”

The 5th Fleet, whose “area of responsibility” includes the Persian Gulf, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, and East African coast as far south as Kenya, is headquartered in Bahrain. That country is anything but secure right now. The emir of a dynasty dating back to the 1780s is quaking in his sandals as his people defy the military and police and occupy Manama’s Pearl Square. They are inspired by the heroic Egyptian people of all ages and faiths who refused to abandon Tahrir Square in Cairo and brought down the despotic Mubarak. The people are rising up from North Africa to the Gulf—invariably (except in the case of Iran) against dictators backed by Washington and protected by the 5th Fleet.

Perhaps the peoples of the region wonder why the U.S. Navy feels it has any “responsibility” for an area 6000 miles away from U.S. shores. More likely, they understand precisely what the U.S. is responsible for: the protection of an intolerable status quo. What are the U.S. bases for — in Eritrea, Bahrain, Oman, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq — other than to maintain the security of the hated elites who back the U.S. in its wars, provide optimal conditions for U.S. investment, and provide weaponry for “security forces” who keep the people down?

Those who disparage these spontaneous uprisings as lacking in political consciousness: Do you not suppose that the masses rebelling understand the basic dynamics of imperialism? You don’t need to read banned texts by Lenin to understand that all the hated regimes rely on the U.S. for support, that the U.S. is all about profiting the few, that the U.S. is controlled by the rich who oppress everyone else. A young man at a demonstration in Egypt holds up a placard reading, “Egypt supports Wisconsin. One world, one pain.”  That says it all.

The arrival of the USS Enterprise coincided with the arrival of two Iranian military vessels (a frigate and supply ship) in the Red Sea. They have been approved by Suez Canal authorities (and thus the Egyptian military) to transit the waterway Monday en route to the coast of Syria, an Iranian ally. This will be the first time that has happened since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

The Constantinople Convention of 1888 guarantees that the canal “shall always be free and open, in time of war as in time of peace, to every vessel of commerce or of war, without distinction of flag.” So the Iranians might at any point have demanded their right to use it. This is no big deal.

The treaty does have an Article 10, allowing measures for “the defense of Egypt and the maintenance of public order.”  This was invoked by Egypt from 1949 to bar Israeli shipping from using the canal. Israeli forces had, after all, massacred Arabs and driven 700,000 into refugee camps and exile in order to form the Zionist state; Egypt and other Arab states attacked Israel only after the carnage was well underway. Israel attacked Egypt in 1956 and 1967, occupying Egyptian territory. But after the Camp David Accords of 1978, Israel gained access to the canal, both for commercial and military ships. Egyptian authorities allowed missile-class warships and missile-equipped submarines to pass through the channel into the Red Sea in 2009, aware that they were preparing for a possible attack on Iran.

The Iranians are entirely in their rights. But Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman calls the passage a “provocation.”  Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk calls the move “very provocative.”  No doubt the U.S. State Department will echo this charge.  Meanwhile Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu calls the situation “grave” and tells his cabinet the Jewish state will have to boost defense spending (which means, of course, that U.S. taxpayers will have to pay more).

Haaretz columnist, Aluf Benn, argues that Egypt’s decision to permit transit indicates that “Egypt is no longer committed to an alliance with Israel against Iran.” If so, it is the most positive achievement so far of Egypt’s “half-revolution”!

“Provocation”?! Haven’t the peoples of this “area of responsibility” of the U.S. Navy been provoked enough by the U.S. and Israel in recent days to laugh off this charge? Whatever they may think of Iran — and certainly feelings vary throughout this complicated region — they certainly can’t view a couple Iranian warships as anything comparably provocative to the Enterprise.

Every substantial report about the uprising in Bahrain mentions how the emirs or kings of the country have for over six decades hosted the 5th Fleet, and how the relationship holds incalculable strategic importance. Bahrain, for example, endorsed and facilitated the U.S. attack on Iraq during the first Gulf War and supported the 2003 invasion. Like Mubarak’s Egypt it’s been a “friend” of the U.S. Its friendship for the U.S., like that of Egypt, has been expressed through conciliatory gestures towards Israel including a degree of diplomatic recognition of the Zionist state.

In the last few days the Arab world (and the whole world) has learned of the duplicity of the U.S. and Israeli-backed Palestinian Authority. We’ve learned about the U.S. alarm over the UN resolution condemning the manifestly illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and how Obama tried to strong-arm the PA into requesting the tabling of the resolution.
The world has seen the sickening spectacle of the U.S. UN ambassador once again shielding the increasingly — shamelessly and overtly — racist apartheid-state from international censure by vetoing that entirely appropriate resolution endorsed by the U.K., Russia, China, France, Germany, India, Brazil, South Africa, Nigeria, everybody else but the U.S.

This was the Obama administration’s first UNSC veto. Why? Because, Ambassador Susan Burns lectured the world, to pass the resolution might set back the cause of a Palestinian state by causing the two sides to “harden” blah blah blah…

The rational mind — not just in the Enterprise’s AOR but everywhere — must wonder how the American officials can expect to retain any credibility. Having demanded the end of settlement activity, then backed off cravenly when Netanyahu refused — while maintaining the uninterrupted flow of aid to the apartheid state — how can the U.S. posture as a force for any good at all in this region for which it laughably claims “responsibility”?

“Hardening of sides”? Please!  The Palestinian officials aligned with the U.S. and Israel have been softening, offering huge concessions that when revealed to the people provoked outrage. That’s why chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erakat, had to resign in disgrace. And the Israeli position has hardened because the Zionists know that they have Obama over a barrel; he knows that if he challenges the Lobby, it will likely destroy his prospects for a second term. There is no “peace process” towards an independent Palestinian state.

So the Enterprise, symbol of wars of aggression producing horrific, ongoing consequences, sails down the Red Sea.  A strike group for U.S. imperialism (associated in the Arabs’ minds with the implacable Zionist enemy) sails through the Gulf of Aden into the Arabian Sea, into the Gulf of Oman, into the Persian Gulf to “maintain pressure” on Iran, a country that has not attacked another in centuries. It claims to “insure stability” in a region where people relish the current instability and take pride in their state of dignified rebellion. The people are standing up, saying “Enough!” (Bas!) to dictators. Are they not implicitly saying “Enough!” to imperialism and Zionism as well?

Meanwhile Iranian warships, with the blessing of the new military caretaker government in Egypt, sail into the Mediterranean to remind Israel that an attack on Syria will have consequences. Now just how provocative is that?

Reporters and commentators on Al-Jazeera and other channels have no choice but to note that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is widely hated, and that those in the street are seeking freedom from a dictatorship. But they also keep saying “The situation is getting worse.”

Worse?

I think of Mao Zedong’s response to critics of peasant rebellion in China in 1927. He noted that “even progressive people” saw uprisings as “terrible.” “But it’s not terrible,” he declared. “It is anything but ‘terrible.’ It’s fine!”

Watching the live coverage, I see the people of Egypt, fed up with their oppression, and inspired by the revolution in Tunisia, doing something very, very fine. It is inspiring. It is profoundly hopeful.

The Obama administration line (as summarized by Joe Biden, interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS), can be summarized as follows: Egyptians have the right to protest. Many are middle class folks, with legitimate concerns. But we should not refer to Mubarak as a dictator. It’s not time for him to go. He has been a key ally of the U.S. and Israel, in the “Middle East peace process” and the War on Terror. Egypt is dissimilar to Tunisia, and it would be “a stretch” to suggest that a trend is underway. The U.S. should encourage those protesting and Mubarak to talk. Everyone should avoid violence.

The mainstream infotainment media spin can be summarized like this: The “unrest” in Egypt puts the U.S. in a difficult position. On the one hand Mubarak has abetted U.S. “national interests” and been Israel’s only Arab ally. (These two are always assumed to be closely linked; the notion that an Arab leader is a friend of the U.S. to the extend that he kisses Israel’s ass is never questioned.) On the other hand, U.S. officials have been saying for years that the Middle East needs “democratic reform.”

This puts in the U.S. in bind, we are told. The U.S. confronts a “dilemma.” The talking heads depict the U.S. as somehow a victim in this situation. (Isn’t it terrible, they’re implying, that the Egyptian people by their militancy in favor of supposed U.S. ideals are trying to topple the USA’s best friend in the Arab world? What a headache to have to deal with!)

Seems to me, however, that this is another of those instances of chickens coming home to roost.

The U.S. has supported Mubarak primarily in appreciation for his stance towards Israel. (The mainstream media is referring to him as an “ally” of Israel.) It’s not really because he’s been a “partner in the peace process”—because there is no real peace process. Relentless Israeli settlement activity on Palestinian land supported by the Lobby in the U.S. has insured that.

Wikileaks documents indicate that Mubarak has been content for the “process” to lag indefinitely so that he could represent himself as the vital Arab middleman while enjoying two billion in U.S. military aid per year. But Palestinians hate him for cooperating with the demonization of democratically elected Hamas and the embargo imposed on Gaza. And Egyptians hate him for, among many other things, betraying their Palestinian brothers and sisters.

Rather, the U.S. has supported Mubarak because he’s provided an Arab fig leaf for the unequivocal support for Israel that the U.S. has provided for decades. U.S. diplomats have, as Wikileaks reveal, at times expressed concern that the dictator might be causing some problems by his “heavy-handed” treatment of dissidents. But this is not a matter of moral indignation, or concern about the lives of Egyptians. It’s nothing more than an expression of concern that his fascistic rule might jeopardize his ability to help U.S.-Israeli policy in the region and keep the Suez Canal open.

And now that brutal rule has caused an explosion. The reaction from U.S. officials and political commentators is, “We never expected this.”

Well surprise, surprise! (These folks were dumbfounded by the Iranian Revolution of 1979 as well. Don’t they understand that people eventually fight back?)

I think of that old Langston Hughes poem:

Egypt is exploding. The deferred dreams of the Arab world are exploding. And even the corporate media acknowledges that the people are jubilant (while warning that none of this might be in “our interest”). But for people with some basic morals, concerned about the happiness of humanity in general, is this not totally fine?

Al-Jazeera shows viewers how U.S. officials are changing the tone of their comments, backing off more and more each day from support of Mubarak. They’re reiterating with increasing emphasis that the demonstrators indeed have legitimacy. (Did these people just figure this out?) What sheer opportunism!

Obama, always the centrist opportunist wanting to be everybody’s friend, wants to be the Egyptian people’s friend. He showed that in Cairo in 2009. In his celebrated speech to the Muslim world he on the one hand spouted platitudes about U.S. acceptance of Islam and on the other insulted everyone’s intelligence by calling the invasion of Afghanistan a “war of necessity.” He (accurately) described the vicious assault on Iraq as a “war of choice,” but said anything about how those responsible for such a crime ought to be punished. He does not support any investigation that would show how neocon Zionists in his predecessor’s administration faked a case for war that has killed hundreds of thousands of Arabs.

His real message is: the U.S. can lie and kill, and then posture as the moral exemplar (maybe even apologizing slightly when crimes are embarrassingly exposed). Even so, the people of the world are supposed to understand that alignment with the U.S. is their best hope.

And now Obama wants the best of both worlds: an ongoing engagement with Mubarak (if he survives), and a hand outstretched to the people of Egypt, tainted by so many other handshakes with so many dictators so far.

Demonstrators in Cairo note that tear gas canisters on the street are marked “Made in USA.” What should they make of that? Who’s really encouraging their dreams? Who’s caused them to defer them, decade upon decade? It’s the same foe that has caused the deferment of dreams here in this country and around the world.

I learned to say shukran in Cairo. To my friends there now, engaged in this fine, fine battle, I say that now.

Shukran, shukran for inspiring the world, showing that another world might be possible.

A spark has been ignited in the Arab world, home to some 360 million people suffering under some of the worst dictatorships that exist today. A 26 year old college student and street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set a match to himself in front of a government building in a town in Tunisia, protesting the government’s policy on licensing street sales. His death immediately made him a hero and martyr and brought down a hated regime.

When I think of self-immolation as political protest, I think of Buddhist monks in Vietnam who could draw upon such scriptures as the Lotus Sutra to validate this form of protest. (In that text a boddhisattva anoints his body with fragrant oil and sets fire to his body, illuminating countless worlds, and the Buddha praises him.) But Tunisia is a Muslim country. Who could have expected this act of protest, and what it’s led to?

Information. Young people are on their laptops, cellphones, I-pods, texting and tweeting as we speak, following the Tunisian events.

Inspiration. From Algeria to Egypt to Yemen, people are saying “We can do that too!” As the Tunisian police force throws its lot in with the protesters, the troops who monitor Cairo’s streets, looking so fierce if hungry, know they can do that too. What is Mubarak to them? The government of Yemen, hated by so many and now so exposed (due to Wikileaks) as complicit in U.S. drone attacks on the country, is in big trouble.

This may be the Arab world’s 1848. Or its 1968. In those years upheavals convulsed the west. Part of it was due to common socio-economic conditions, part of it was due to the power of suggestion: If they can topple their rulers, so can we. It is the real power of hope, not Obama’s bogus version. It is real belief in change that strengthens as people see their streets filled with neighbors defying the security forces and able to get away with it.

There is no guarantee that whatever new governments emerge will be better than those toppled in the next few weeks. “The real fruit” of these battles, as a great man once wrote, “lies not in the immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers.”

Pan-Arabism is a fine thing. (It’s also a central tenet of Baathist ideology, that of Saddam Hussein’s party in Iraq, once supported by the U.S. as an alternative to Islamist or communist parties). The idea that Arabic-speaking peoples are a nation, from the Atlantic coast of West Africa to Iraq, remains strong and insures that events in one Arab nation resonate in others. Nothing excites oppressed people more than the example of a revolution in a kindred country. This is why crowned heads and miscellaneous CIA-installed thugs throughout the Middle East are now quaking in their boots, cracking down or then offering concessions.

There is great disorder under heaven, as the Chinese communists – when they were communists – used to say. The situation is excellent.

92% of respondents in the Pashtun-dominated south are unaware of 9/11 events or their relationship to the presence of foreign troops.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at the 92% figure. After all, Afghanistan is one of the least literate societies on earth, and  a 2005 report indicated that any “press is scarce in rural areas.”  The radio is the most widely used method of communication in Afghanistan, but there are fewer radios per capita than in any other country on earth.  There are only 5.6 radios per 1000 people in the country. (Bhutan ranks immediately ahead of Afghanistan on a list of 212 nations. There there are three times as many radios — 16.5 — per 1000 people. In Haiti and Somalia there are more than 50 radios per 1000 people.) The Afghans are not just benighted in their illiteracy, but terribly lacking in access to basic communications technology.

As we will see the illiteracy problem, and general lack of education, has become a major headache for the invaders who arrogantly toppled the old regime and imposed an occupation seeking to remake Afghan society.

In 1978 literacy throughout Afghanistan was estimated at 11.4 % (18.7 % male; 2.8 female). By 1993 the overall literacy rate had risen to 29.8 % (45.2 % males; 13.5 % females), reflecting the influence of the Soviet presence and the secular government’s education policy.

Under the regime of the warlords and mujahadeen that toppled the secular government, literacy fell slightly to 28.1% (43.1% males; 12.6% females) in 2000. This placed Afghanistan at the rank of 199th lowest out of 201 countries, with only Chad and Burkino Faso scoring lower. The CIA Factbook cites the 2000 figure.  UNICEF estimates a 28% literacy rate between 2003 and 2008.

An April 2008 report by the Afghan Ministry of Education gives a slightly more optimistic picture, indicating total literacy may have risen 6% between 2000 and 2005. “With no current census, accurate literacy statistics for Afghanistan are not available. According to Afghanistan’s Millennium Development Goals Report (2005), the estimated literacy rate of those aged 15 and above was 34% in 2004 (50% for men and 18% for women). In rural areas where 74% of all Afghans live, however, an estimated 90 % of women and 63% of men cannot read, write and do a simple math computation… The rates are only somewhat better in urban areas.” But UNESCO reported in September 2010 that the literacy rate among Afghans over 15 was down to 26% (12% among women).

In other words, there has been no significant progress since the U.S. and its allies invaded and occupied Afghanistan nine years ago.

In 2006 the Ministry of Education announced a “Five Year Strategic Plan” to reach a goal of 50% literacy by 2010. (It had a target budget of $ 125 million, but only $ 15 million available at that time.)

But, as the UNESCO report noted, the government now plans to meets its goal five years later than announced in 2006 — the target year is now 2015.

There are no end to rosy reports about this or that NGO-staffed literacy project. One called Help the Afghan Children (HTAC) provides education to 23,000, and its associates collect school supplies for Afghanistan in the U.S., establishes sister-school relationships between U.S. and Afghan institutions, etc. A Japanese NGO is teaching 180 women and girls.

The U.S. military, to build good will, also educates some children. Members of the Combined Joint Task Force 101 Human Terrain Analysis Team in Bagram teach children and women who visit an Army-run hospital two days a week.

One wonders what language they’re teaching them.

Anyway it’s all a drop in the bucket. The only period in recent Afghan history when there was an appreciable, rapid increase in literacy was during the pro-Soviet  “Democratic Republic” era, when as the figures cited above show, total literacy increased by 62% (from 11.4 to 29.8%). For males it increased 59%, for females 79%.

The Soviets — however wrong they were to intervene as they did in Afghanistan — were always concerned about education. Aside from establishing schools in areas firmly under their control (in Kabul, particularly, which was relatively peaceful throughout the 1980s) they accepted tens of thousands of students into schools in the USSR. There were an estimated 15,000 Afghans studying in the Soviet Union in 1986.  (I wonder if there are that many in the U.S. in 2010; I haven’t been able to find any cumulative figures.)

One has only to look at the literacy figures in the former Soviet republics of Uzbekistan (99.3%), Tajikistan (99.5%), Kyrgyzstan (99%), Kazakhstan (99.5%) and Turkmenistan (98.8) and compare them with those of Afghanistan (and of Pakistan, which has an adult literacy rate estimated at between 50 and 57%, the female figure at between 36 and 45%) to realize that the basis for backwardness isn’t cultural or ethnic. There have been past eras in which the region was anything but “backward.” The Hellenistic kingdom of Bactria, with its capital at Balkh, was among the most advanced in the ancient world. Balkh was a key city on the Silk Road through the seventh century, a hub of trade connecting that leg of the route that led west all the way to Antioch, and the leg that led through Central Asia to the Chinese capital. It was a center of both Buddhist and Zoroastrian learning, hardly a backwater.

Why did Afghanistan plunge into the nations of lowest literacy rank? I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with multiple invasions over centuries (Arabs, Mongols, Turks, British, etc.) and the cultivation of a particularly anti-intellectual Islam as a defense mechanism. In any case, why has the U.S.-led occupation force and the regime it placed in power been unable to dent the illiteracy figure in an interval as long as the Soviet occupation that produced fairly dramatic results?

In the 1980s the drive to educate girls and women was ferociously resisted by the jihadis bankrolled by the CIA and U.S. ally Saudi Arabia. (The Saudi mujahadeen were of course led by then-U.S. ally Osama bin Laden.) Such people want to confine women and girls to the home, in non-threatening ignorance. The concept of coeducation is abhorrent to them, as is the prospect of a male doctor even handling the wrist of a Muslim female to measure her pulse. The U.S. was comfortable with all this anti-intellectualism and misogyny so long as its proponents were willing to cooperate to “defeat communism.” Ironically the illiteracy they positively promoted then by backing the most extreme Islamists has come back to haunt them now.

The invasion from October 2001 toppled the Taliban, one faction that had emerged from the anti-Soviet holy warriors with Pakistani support. But that has not eliminated their capacity to discourage school attendance. More than 3,500 schools were built between 2002 and 2008, according to the Ministry of Education, but in the latter year over 600 had been closed due to Taliban attacks and threats. In Helmand province, only 54 of the 223 schools (mostly for boys only) that had operated in 2002 were open, and in Kandahar, Zabul and Urozgan, up to 80% of the schools were closed. Thus over 300,000 students were being deprived of an education.  How can U.S. troops boast of their good work in building schools when no one can attend them, or students are terrified to do so?

But it’s not just the Talibs who are hostile to education. There are attacks on female students even in the capital of Kabul, from people who basically support the new regime. They too put pressure on girls reaching puberty to quit school in order to marry and serve their families, sometimes attacking them violently when they refuse.  The conflation of the Taliban and fundamentalist Islam in Afghanistan was always simplistic. The Taliban never had a monopoly on conservative Islamist thinking, and just as the occupation has not eliminated the wearing of the burqa, it has not changed the way that most Afghans think.

So on the one hand you have the invading, occupying soldiers, trained to think the “Hajjis” they’re killing somehow deserve it because they “attacked us.”  Some of these guys have posters on their barracks walls showing bin Laden and Hussein next to one another. They’ve  been encouraged all along to link al-Qaeda with Iraq. How much more reason to link it with Afghanistan where bin Laden operated training camps? Never mind that those were established with assistance from the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI, that bin Laden was there before the Taliban took power, and that the Taliban leadership, to say nothing of the rank and file, may have been clueless about the 9/11 plot. Neocon strategy has always been to conflate disparate Muslim targets, exploiting ignorance and encouraging hatred and fear to obtain geo-strategic goals.

Despite the pro forma cautionary remarks the troops may hear from their commanders about respecting Islam, some conclude that Islam is indeed the problem. Haven’t some of the top brass encouraged them to do so? And hasn’t such cultural and moral illiteracy produced (in the minds of some) a lust for collective punishment, including random killings for sport? 

On the other hand you have uneducated Afghans who, while accustomed to the presence of foreign invaders (a near-constant in Afghan history), don’t quite understand the present invader’s justification for his own presence. 40% of those polled think the foreigners are occupying Afghanistan as part of a campaign to destroy Islam.

So the GI filled with a sense of revenge and self-righteousness busts into a home and terrorizes the residents, while the latter have no clear idea why he’s killing, binding, arresting, and humiliating them. They don’t know that he (thinks he) is seeking out bad guys who, if they take over the Afghan state, will sponsor terrorists who will strike the U.S. again. They might find that whole story beyond imagining. Their country, their village, a threat to this powerfully armed intruder from seven thousand miles away? It doesn’t make any sense. The natural default understanding is that he and his comrades are hostile to their religion.

Many years ago I read The Horseman, a moving novel by the French writer Joseph Kessel (first published as Le Chevalier in 1967).  It was later made into a movie directed by Dalton Trumbo and starring Omar Sharif. Its hero is Uraz, a young Uzbek from Maimana in the northwest of Afghanistan, who travels to Kabul to participate in a game of buzkashi, an ancient equestrian sport related to polo. He’s bitterly embarrassed by losing the game, breaking his leg in the process. Taken to the new Soviet-built hospital, he has a plaster cast applied to the injured limb. (The story takes place in the 1960s, before the Soviet invasion, but even then the neighboring USSR was providing the neutral country with most of its foreign aid.)

Uraz is frightened and disturbed by the gleaming white walls of the hospital, the manners of the foreign doctors, and the sense of confinement. He is puzzled about the nature of the cast (“the evil box”). To escape he leaps from the window to mount his magnificent horse waiting below, then makes the long trek back to Maimana. After he cuts  away the evil cast, his leg atrophies and eventually has to be sawed off.  But he eventually makes it back home, only to head off for another adventure. In 1971 film critic Vincent Canby of the New York Times panned the film based on the book as “fiction designed to glorify machismo of the most ignorant, savage sort, the cult of manliness that has, I suspect, its closest civilized equivalent in the totalitarian political movements of the 1930’s, which put so much stress on style and very little on content.”

I think that Canby was a little off base. (For one thing, “totalitarianism’ requires deployment of propaganda through modern mass media that doesn’t exist in Afghanistan.) Kessel was plausibly depicting the mindset of  proud, fiercely independent tribesmen little concerned with,  and largely ignorant of , the outside world. Uraz probably wouldn’t have known about things like the Cuban Missile Crisis, just as so many today are clueless about 9/11. (44% of the Afghan population is under 15 and many don’t remember much that happened in 2001.) Uraz isn’t a warlord, Islamist militant, or evil man. He’s just an unsophisticated guy reflecting his culture.

The U.S. invaded Uraz’s Afghanistan, “graveyard of empires,’ and quickly got itself into a bloody morass. The Taliban it thought was defeated proved to be remarkably resilient. It competes effectively for hearts and minds with the corrupt Karzai client-regime that has disappointed, frustrated and sometimes infuriated its own creators. U.S. public opinion has turned, perhaps decisively, against the war as the polls now show 50% opposed, 44% supportive. The war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history! Longer than the Vietnam War that tore this country apart…

Recall that U.S. public opinion was once solidly in favor of this war. To suggest that it was anything other than the obvious, natural, legitimate response to 9/11 was once enough to invite fisticuffs in some circles. They attacked us! We have to respond! (And to respond, as Rumsfeld put it, to “things related and unrelated” — al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Iraq, Syria, Iran… To “make no distinction” as Bush put it “between terrorists and states who harbor them.”)  This just goes to show that there’s a lot of bull-headed ignorance to go around in this world, and that people in the U.S. can be as ferociously tribal and inclined to exact blood vengeance as any illiterate villager in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama threw in his lot with the pro-war crowd early on in his presidential campaign, displaying his machismo (one’s tempted to say, “of the most ignorant, savage sort”) by coupling his limp criticism of Bush’s war in Iraq with a passionate embrace of the Afghan campaign. And then, hoping to at some point disengage himself from what could be the graveyard of his presidency, he announced his intention to turn over the war to trained Afghan forces. The problem is, these Uraz-types aren’t picking up the baton very capably.  They can’t read. They’re not aware of, or concerned about, the outside world, or about fighting the west’s battles. They just want to be left alone.

One might say that the very ignorance of the people they strive to control militates against the ignorant invaders. The troops despair at the fact that the Afghans they’re obliged to work with can’t read training manuals or written instructions. According to one report, only 18 % of the 243,000 ANA and Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) “have more than a Kindergarten-level ability to read.”  “Fucking worthless,” says an unnamed U.S. soldier quoted in the Washington Post November 18. “They’re a joke.”

“Illiteracy is a problem we have to tackle if we intend to turn the ANSF into a modern military and police force,” says Mike Faughnan, head of education for the NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan’s Combined Security Transition Command. “The impact of illiteracy that we see is an inability to perform the missions and duties of the army and police, limitations in the types of training we can provide — everything has to be hands-on — and limitations in the levels of training. We can’t do anything more than train at the very basic level in any of the fields that we work with.”

Lt. Gen. William Caldwell, head of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan, told reporters, “Unless we take on literacy, we truly will never professionalize this force. We’re not talking about making them high school graduates. We’re talking about giving them anywhere from between a first grade-level education to about a third grade-level education. For many back in America, that’s really hard to comprehend. And I understand that.  It was for me, too.”

Thus U.S. forces on the ground are burdened with the impossible task of detaching themselves from the quagmire Bush and Obama have created by teaching Afghan recruits to read and write, transform their world outlook, master sophisticated equipment, and then kill their countrymen to produce a political system that many, if not most, find alien and puzzling.  (According to the ICOS report, 43% of respondents in Helmand and Kandahar were “unable to name the good things about democracy.”)

The boys the invaders are supposed to train — many under 12 years old when the 9/11 attacks occurred — can’t read Pashto or Dari much less English. These boys are as sympathetic to the Taliban as they are to NATO and the U.S. and will, according to Gen. Caldwell, receive a third grade education at most. And they’re supposed to take over in 2014 (or some other point) so the invaders can go home, “mission accomplished.”

That’s an unlikely scenario. They know they cannot win militarily, and so must ultimately withdraw.  Some anticipate a bloodbath when that happens. A repeat of Iraq is quite likely: a limited withdrawal leaving lots of troops within a context of ongoing civil war sparked by the U.S. invasion. Endless Afghan-on-Afghan bloodletting (Rumsfeld might call it “creative chaos”) contained just sufficiently to allow for gas pipeline construction.

Top NATO envoy Mark Sedwill (from the U.K.) acknowledges that after the eventual withdrawal, “Our expectation is that there still would be a certain level of violence, probably levels of violence that are by Western standards pretty eye-watering, around parts of the country.”

Eye-watering — by Western standards! So there are different “standards” of grief when children are killed? Are people in the U.S. and Britain spilling tears over the routine missile strikes wiping out families in Afghanistan, showing exemplary, high standards of compassion? Sedwill’s comment reminds me of Gen. Westmoreland’s famous remark at the height of the Vietnam War:  “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” Here is ignorance plus racism plus indifference to human suffering, all in the service of imperialism. The ignorance of the illiterate Afghan is by comparison benign and innocent.

Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the people of Israel.

— Israeli rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas party spiritual leader, Oct. 11, 2010

The Shas Party is a mainstream Israeli political party founded in 1984 by ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Jews. The name is an acronym for  Shomrei Torah Sephardim or “Observant Sepharadim.” (Sepharadim are for the most part Jews tracing their ancestry to the Iberian Peninsula, as opposed to the Ashkenazim who trace theirs to Germany, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. They are sometimes grouped together with the Mizrahim who have lived for centuries in the Arab Middle East, Iran and Uzbekistan.)

The party holds 11 seats in the Israeli Knesset (parliament). Its first leader, Rabbi Yitzhak Peretz, served as a interior minister in the 1980s. Its current spiritual leader, 90 year old Rabbi  Ovadia Yosef, holds no political position but four Shas members now hold posts (including interior minister) in the cabinet of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

It is an anti-intellectual, religiously fundamentalist party. Like many groups in the U.S., and many prominent U.S. politicians, it rejects (and misrepresents) evolutionary theory, a pillar of modern science. One of its TV campaign ads bore the message, “One old Sepharadi lady kissing a Torah book with a tear in her eye is worth more than 40 university professors who tell us we are descended from monkeys.”

Yosef is head of Shas’s “Council of Torah Sages.”  From 1973 to 1983 he was the Chief Rabbi of Israel’s Sephardic Jews, who with his Ashkenazi counterpart headed Israel’s Chief Rabbinate. By Israeli law this body regulates Jewish weddings, divorce proceedings, conversions and the recognition of Jewishness for immigration purposes. Especially revered by Orthodox Mizrahi Jews, he is widely considered the foremost authority on the Halakhah or Jewish religious law.

The rabbi has made explosive pronouncements in past sermons. On Passover in 2001 he preached: “It is forbidden to be merciful to [the Palestinians]. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.” In December 2009 he declared: “[The Palestinians] are stupid. Their religion is as ugly as they are.” In a sermon last August he raged, “[Palestinian leader] Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] and all these evil people should perish from this world.  God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.”

These may seem the ravings of a madman, or at least prime examples of racist hate-speech. But this rabbi is no fringe phenomenon. He has a large and respectful following in Israel.

On October 11, Yosef gave his regular Saturday night sermon, some of it later broadcast on Israeli TV. This time he told his congregation that Goyim (a disparaging term for non-Jews in Yiddish) were created merely to “serve” Jews. Addressing the question of what types of work non-Jews should be able to perform on the Jewish sabbath, he stated, “Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world; only to serve the People of Israel.”

“Why are gentiles needed?” he asked rhetorically. “They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat.” (“Effendi” is a word used in the old Ottoman Empire for an educated gentleman or lord.) This comment reportedly met with laughter from his flock.

Why does Yosef think God lets non-Jews live out their lives? “They need to die, but God will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant. That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew.”

Reading this garbage, I thought of the daily abuse of Palestinians by Zionist settlers in Hebron on the occupied West Bank. The five or six hundred Jewish settlers routinely attack Palestinians (among the 160,000 Palestinians who inhabit Hebron), destroying their fruit trees, hurling rocks at them, attacking their homes with impunity protected by the “Israeli Defense Forces.” IDF soldiers have been video-taped this year doing a Macarena-like dance in the streets of this Arab city  during the Muslim call to prayer–a deliberate statement of contempt dismissed as a youthful “prank” by their commanding officers.  Meanwhile Palestinians’ movements are restricted, and they are banned from a Jews-only section of their city.

I thought of the low-paid Chinese, Thai, and Filipino construction, farm and health workers recruited by Israel as temporary workers to replace the feared and despised Palestinians. I thought too of the recent poll showing that half of Israeli high school students don’t want to study alongside Palestinians, or believe they should enjoy equal rights, or be able to run for parliamentary office. (82% of those describing themselves as “religious” opposed equal rights. The figure for the kids describing themselves as “secular” was much lower. Only about one-third of Israelis are religious Jews–about the same number as are atheist or agnostic).

I recalled how one Rabbi Yaacov Perin had declared at the funeral of Baruch Goldstein, the U.S.-born Jewish settler who killed at least 29 Palestinian Muslims praying at a mosque in occupied Hebron in February 1994: “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail… There are no innocent Arabs…”

I thought about Rabbi Yitzhak Shapiro, a West Bank settler, who wrote in his best-selling book The King’s Torah (2001), “ It is permissible to kill the Righteous among non-Jews even if they are not responsible for the threatening situation,” and “If we kill a Gentile who has sinned or has violated one of the seven commandments – because we care about the commandments – there is nothing wrong with the murder.”

I also couldn’t help but think of how former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert once boasted to an Israeli crowd in the formerly Arab town of Ashkelon that he had forced then-President Bush to humiliate then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It was in January 2009, after the vicious Israeli attack on Gaza. In the face of international horror, the U.S. had (for purely pragmatic diplomatic reasons) helped author a resolution calling for an end to violence on both sides.

Olmert proudly told his audience: “When we saw that the Secretary of State, for reasons we did not really understand, wanted to vote in favor of the UN resolution … I looked for President Bush and they told me he was in Philadelphia making a speech. I said,  ‘I don’t care. I have to talk to him now… They got him off the podium, brought him to another room and I spoke to him. I told him, ‘You can’t vote in favor of this resolution.’ He said, ‘Listen, I don’t know about it, I didn’t see it, I’m not familiar with the phrasing.’”

Olmert said he’d then told Bush: “‘I’m familiar with it. You can’t vote in favor.’ [Bush then] gave an order to the Secretary of State and she did not vote in favor of it, a resolution she cooked up, phrased, organized and maneuvered for. She was left pretty shamed and abstained on a resolution she arranged.”

This was, of course, after the U.S. Congress had near unanimously passed a resolution supporting the Gaza blitzkrieg, demonstrating the extraordinary power of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which has successfully avoided the demand of critics that it be registered as the agent of a foreign government. (Recall how in November 2009, after a UN inquiry headed by South African judge, Richard Goldstone, who happens to be Jewish, concluded that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes during Israel’s assault on Gaza–resulting in over 1,300 Palestinian deaths, overwhelmingly civilian, and a total of 9 Israeli deaths at the hands of Palestinians–the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution condemning the UN report! The official position of the U.S. Congress has become: No one can be allowed criticize Israel.  Any such criticism is unfair, “one-sided,” “unbalanced.”

Reading Yosef’s remarks I also thought of Netanyahu’s 2001 interview, leaked last July, in which he frankly discussed his intention to ignore the Oslo Accords, continue settlements and launch a “total assault” on the Palestinian Authority. When asked about a possible negative U.S. reaction, he exclaimed: “Especially now, with America, I know what America is. America is a thing that can be easily moved, moved in the right direction. They  will not bother us. Let’s suppose that [the Americans] will say something . . . so they say it…  Eighty per cent of the Americans support us. It’s absurd! We have such support there! And we say… what shall we do with this?” He was virtually ridiculing the pathetic manipulability of the U.S. public and Congress.

And then there was that statement by former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon (also known as the “butcher of Sabra and Shatila” due to his complicity in the annihilation of up to 3500 Palestinians refugees in Beirut during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982) to Foreign Minister Shimon Peres in October 2001: “Every time we do something you tell me America will do this and will do that …  I want to tell you something very clear: Don’t worry about American pressure on Israel. We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it.”

Last March Vice President Joe Biden visited Israel to pledge the U.S.’s undying loyalty to the Jewish state. His message was that, despite President Obama’s request — based on U.S. geostrategic interests — that Israel freeze settlement on occupied Palestinian land, and Israel’s refusal to do so more than partially and temporarily, U.S. support would continue as always. The Israeli Interior Ministry (headed by Shas Party member Eli Yishai) used the occasion of the visit to announce the construction of 1,600 new homes for Jews in occupied East Jerusalem. The insult was so brazen that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “condemned” the move which she said “undermined trust and confidence in the peace process.” Zionists responded with their typical indignation. (The Anti-Defamation League called Clinton’s remarks a “gross overreaction” towards a “policy.” Former New York City mayor Ed Koch accused Obama of wanting to “make Israel into a pariah” and called Clinton’s comments “outrageous.”)

Then as Biden was addressing the Jewish Federations of North America two weeks ago assuring them that U.S. support for Israel was “literally unbreakable,” and would “continue forever,” and dismissing the recent rift as being “only tactical” in nature, Israel’s cabinet announced more illegal settlement housing construction plans.

Is all this mere chutzpah? Or is it the behavior of a true effendi? Is it not amazing that a regime claiming to represent the Jews in Israel (under 0.01% of the total global human population) or even all the Jews on the planet (under 0.02% of humankind) can boast of its ability to arm-twist U.S. presidents? That officials in a country with a stagnant economy with no raw materials dependent annually on two or three billion dollars in direct U.S. aid (matched by private U.S. donors) to sustain a First World type living standard (for Jews if not for the Palestinians in the occupied territories) can claim to “control America”? That it has been able since 1972 to count on the U.S. to veto practically every UN resolution even mildly critical of its behavior, often supported by all other member states except Israel itself?

Is it not amazing that such Zionists enjoy free license to provoke, thorough their occupations and aggressions, the outrage of 1.57 billion Muslims (23% of the world’s population), some of whom predictably vent their rage on the U.S. as Israel’s unconditional friend?

And is it not amazing that agents for Israel within AIPAC (Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman) could spy in the U.S., obtain classified documents pertaining to Iran (which Israel demands the U.S. bomb), get arrested by the FBI and charged with serious crimes in 2005, only to have all charges dropped in 2009? Or that ranking Congresswoman Jane Harmon, who agreed to “waddle in” to that case in an FBI-intercepted call with an Israeli agent, could escape any charges?

Is it not amazing that the presumptive Majority Leader in the new House of Representatives, ardent Zionist Eric Cantor (R-Va.), was in Israel last week meeting with Netanyahu, telling him that “the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington”, and that “the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other”?

The implicit criticism of Obama’s lack of adequate obsequiousness was obvious, and a number of pundits noted that such deference towards a foreign leader by a Congressional leader on a trip abroad combined with such criticism of a president is unprecedented.

Obama, recognizing what his intelligence officials and military leaders (including Gen. Petraeus) are telling him, has been trying to nudge Israel towards compliance with international law and a settlement with the Palestinians. He probably knows that Israel has become an albatross around the neck of the U.S. (which is to say, the U.S. ruling class and its geopolitical objectives). Still, he capitulates in the face of Israeli intransigence, fearing to offend the Lobby and a crucial voting bloc.

Even so (despite Obama’s own abject deference to Israel), Cantor visited the Israeli prime minister, who heads the most racist, pro-settler cabinet ever, and assured him that the Republicans in Congress will be even more unquestionably pro-Israel. And he blithely tossed out what to thinking people must seem an infinitely absurd proposition–that the security of the U.S. depends upon the security of Israel! The security of an imperialist country with over 300 million people (4.5 percent of the world’s population) and half the world’s military budget, bounded by two oceans and long secure borders with client states, never subject to invasion, with 2.5 million troops stationed on over 700 military bases all over the globe depends on the security of a settler-state of 7 million, imposed on the Middle East, hard-pressed to maintain a Jewish majority in the face of the colonized Palestinian’s procreation rate and the outflow of disillusioned Jews?

The security of the U.S. depends upon more invasions of Lebanon, more attacks on the concentration camp that is Gaza, more Israeli strikes against Syria, maybe an Israeli assault on Iran? The security of this country, largely dependent on oil imports from Arab countries whose peoples hate the Zionists for what they’ve done, depends on the security of a nuclear-armed state that routinely attacks its neighbors? The logic is just crazy.

It is indeed contradicted by top U.S. officials. Didn’t Gen. Petraeus tell the Senate Armed Services Committee last March that the “enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the area of responsibility”? Vice President Biden reportedly told Netanyahu, “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of US partnerships with governments and peoples [in the region]. This is starting to get dangerous for us. What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace.”

But recall that Petraeus, informed by his neocon friend, Max Boot, a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and contributor to Commentary magazine, that his comment was producing charges of anti-Semitism in the Zionist community, subsequently sought to minimize it. He had Boot write an article defending him as pro-Israel and wrote his friend: “Thx, Max.  (Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?!  And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome…)”

Imagine that. The most powerful U.S. general since Eisenhower concerned that honest words might offend Israel and its powerful supporters.

The contempt that Israel and its Lobby show for both logic and compassion, their expectation that people can be easily duped and/or bullied into confusing moral right from wrong (into seeing knee-jerk support for Israel as a virtually religious duty)—-is sickeningly amazing. But it’s more sickening to see it work so consistently and well in the manipulation of U.S. public opinion.

One wants, out of respect for religion, its historical roots and the complex role it fills in people’s lives, to dissociate people’s doctrinal loyalties from their politics. But reading Yosef’s comments, I can’t help but link their arrogance and viciousness to the ancient texts the rabbi reveres.  The scriptures that Jews call the Tanakh and Christians the Old Testament are filled with references to the Chosen People slaughtering the peoples of Canaan following their supposed period of bondage in Egypt (during which God among other things struck down dead all the eldest sons of all Egyptians to punish the pharaoh for not allowing the Hebrews to leave).

In the Book of Deuteronomy, the prophet Moses having descended from Mt. Sinai after receiving the Laws from God tells the Hebrews:

When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites—seven nations mightier and more numerous than you—and when the Lord your God gives them over to you and defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them …  break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred poles, and burn their idols with fire. For you are a holy people to the Lord your God, the Lord your God has chosen you out of the peoples on earth to be his people, his treasured possession. (Deuteronomy 7: 1-6)

The Book of Joshua describes one bloodbath after another, emphasizing that the Israelites killed all non-Israelite men, women and children, with the exception of some who abjectly submitted to them acknowledging that “the Lord your God had commanded his servant Moses to give you all the land, and to destroy all the inhabitants of the land before you.” (These having surrendered were enslaved, made “hewers of wood and drawers of water for the congregation,” Joshua 9: 24-7.) The accounts detail the humiliations meted out to the kings of the slaughtered.

When Israel [in the course of conquering Canaan, the “promised land”] had finished killing all the inhabitants of Ai in the open wilderness where they pursued them, and all of them to the very last had fallen by the edge of the sword, all Israel returned to Ai and struck it down with the edge of the sword. The total of those who fell that day, both men and women, was twelve thousand — all the people of Ai. For Joshua did not draw back his hand, with which he stretched out the sword, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai. Only the livestock and the spoil of that city Israel took as their booty, according to the word of the Lord that he had issued to Joshua. So Joshua burned Ai, and made it for ever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day. And he hanged the king of Ai on a tree… (Joshua 8:24-25)

Moses became angry with the officers of the army, the commanders of thousands and the commanders of hundreds, who had come from service in the war [to conquer Canaan]. Moses said to them, “Have you allowed all the women to live? … Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known a man by sleeping with him.  But all the young girls who have not known a man by sleeping with him, keep alive for yourselves. (Numbers  31:14-18)

These Canaanites hadn’t done anything wrong, nothing to deserve annihilation. They were just there, and according to the story the God who made the whole cosmos in seven days wanted them eliminated to make room for His people to enjoy the “land of milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8).

Psalm 137 expresses bitterness at the Assyrian/Babylonian conquest of Judah in the sixth century BCE, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and subsequent Babylonian Exile. “O daughter Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (Psalm 137: 8-9)  (By the way, towards the end of this period the exiles exposed to Persian Zoroastrian thought borrowed ideas about heaven, a devil, a messiah, etc. And many, content with their lot in what is now Iran, elected not to return to Israel when the Persian king Cyprus allowed them to do so in the 530s BCE. So the Exile was not an entirely negative experience.)

Is there no linkage between such murderous Bible passages and the hateful rantings of the esteemed rabbi?

Many people, of course, seriously believe the Old Testament narrative. Half the world’s population is at least nominally Christian, and perhaps most buy the idea that the Creator of the Universe “chose” a specific bloodline for an ongoing, intimate, special relationship with him (at least until Jesus arrived to save everybody who believes in him). They believe that God communicated with his Chosen People through prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, etc. and the scribes whose writings constitute “inspired” Holy Writ.

God (Yahweh) vowed to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob that they and their descendents, if they kept their “covenant” with him, would reside in the “Promised Land.”  If exiled, punished by their sins by this vengeful God, they would be forgiven and restored to their birthright eventually, as God shows his mercy. Thus, some believe, all Jews (any who define as such and are recognized as such by Jewish authorities) have a special right to live in Israel regardless of what any human-authored law might say about the matter.

Far more Christians believe this story line than Jews. There are around 75 million evangelical Christians in this country alone, far outnumbering the religious Jews in the world. (There are about 14 million Jews, maybe two-thirds of them religious.) These Christians may believe that “the Jews” are somehow collectively responsible for killing the Son of God, a conviction encouraged by such New Testament passages as Matthew 27:24-25, John 19:15-16, and 1 Thessalonians 2:14-15. They may believe that all those refusing to embrace Christianity will be incinerated by a wrathful God before the Rapture as prophesized in the Book of Revelation. But in the meantime some of these Christians delight in finding common ground with religious Jews. Some have even taken to celebrating Hannukah.

For many of us who do not believe in the existence of the vengeful, mercurial biblical God, and have studied the real history of the world, the scriptural narrative is at best interesting, quaint mythology. At worst it is a set of dangerous delusions that could justify genocide.

Consider how literal belief in this narrative has affected our own history. Many of the English settlers in the New World in the seventeenth century were convinced that they were the contemporary “Chosen People.”  Obviously, they reasoned, the Jews had lost their chosen status due to their rejection of Jesus as the messiah. The torch had been passed.

The English thought they were special in God’s eyes due to their virtuous and “correct” Protestant faith and the evident favor of God who’d brought Britons victory against heretical Catholic Spain and its invading Armada in 1588. So it was natural for the Virginia planter John Rolfe, who sought to marry the native American princess Pochahantas in 1614, to express anxiety about “the heavy displeasure which almighty God conceived against the sons of Levy for marrying strange [foreign] wives.” Rolfe was placing himself in the position of an Old Testament Jew, and was recalling that in the Book of Ezra, God had demanded that the Israelites allowed to return home from Babylonian exile cut themselves off from any non-Jewish spouses and half-Jewish children. Their “holy seed [had] mixed itself with the peoples” of Canaan, and with the Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites. And this was an “abomination” (Ezra 9:1). The biblical prejudice against intermarriage between God’s “chosen” and “pagan” peoples deeply troubled Rolfe, although he did wind up marrying Pochahantas.

More commonly the settlers slaughtered or displaced the native peoples. The English settlers in the New World sometimes referred to America as their “Promised Land,” and they modelled their own savage attacks on the indigenous on the Israelites’ treatment of the Canaanites. When, for example, English “Pilgrims” including William Bradford torched a Pequot village in 1637 they were filled with the conviction that they were implementing God’s will:

Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword; some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so that they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire…horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

There is a deep tendency in the U.S. psyche to identify with the biblical Hebrews and their legendary exodus from the Egyptian “house of bondage” into the promised land, celebrated in music from Stennett and Durham’s “Bound for the Promised Land” (ca. 1835) sung by settlers on the Oregon Trail to Negro spirituals and even to Bruce Springsteen’s “Promised Land.” (To be fair to Bruce, his song seems sardonic; it calls on people to “blow away the dreams that break your heart.”)

The settlers along the Oregon Trail realizing their “manifest destiny” slaughtered Sioux (Grattan Massacre, 1854), Shoshoni (Bear River Massacre, 1863) and members of other native tribes. This “promised land” theme in our own history prettifies what is, in fact, a horrifying tale of land seizure and ethnic cleansing.

The horror is not in the actual history of the Middle East. As Rabbi David Wolpe has honestly pointed out, there is no archeological evidence for a Hebrew period of bondage in Egypt, exodus, or Hebrew invasion of Canaan. And modern scholars such as Israeli historian, Shlomo Sand, have blown apart the myth that Jews constitute a bloodline dating back to the legendary Abraham.  This effectively undercuts the argument that Jews have a “birthright” to “return” to their ancestral homeland. The “homeland” of many is indeed the grassy plains of southern Russia and the mountains of the Caucasus, where the Khazars–of Central Asian Turkish origin–converted to Judaism in large numbers from the eighth century.  What historical, ancestral link do they have to the “promised land”?

There are Christians and Jews today who find the Bible passages quoted above disturbing. Yet many shrug their shoulders declaring that “God moves in mysterious ways,” his reasons sometimes unfathomable to mere humans. Some may think that such behavior was appropriate in the distant past but barbarous in the twenty-first century. But once you accept the idea that the carnage described occurred at God’s orders, it doesn’t require a great mental leap to justify modern genocide.

That is, of course, what Rabbi Yosuf does. “You must send missiles to them and annihilate them,” he declares. “All these evil people should perish from this world… God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians.” And certainly many West Bank settlers — such as those who glorify Baruch Goldstein — would just as soon slaughter any resisting their claim to a “birthright” to Palestinian land.

Doesn’t literal acceptance of the Old Testament narrative itself prompt or justify racism and genocide? Doesn’t the concept of a divinely “Chosen People” itself challenge rational and democratic values that have been spreading since the Enlightenment?

Many people, including the majority of ambassadors to the UN in 1975, have labeled Zionism a form of racism. Zionism is a modern nationalist political ideology that asserts the right of Jews to establish a state in what is posited (very dubiously) as the ancestral homeland of most modern Jews. It is not essentially a religious ideology; most of the early Zionist leaders including Theodor Herzl  were, in fact, quite irreligious. But Zionism plainly exploits the belief of the devout religious believer that the Creator of the entire cosmos really gave Jews rights to land in the Middle East that trump any centuries-old claim anyone else might have.

(It should always be noted — if bloodline is so important — that among the Palestinian Arabs there are undoubtedly the descendents of first-century Judaeans who at some point converted to Christianity or Islam. Might not God’s promise to Abraham apply to them?)

Many Zionists make their case in entirely non-religious terms, stressing the history of Jewish persecution culminating in the Holocaust, the supposed need for a state to insure the survival of the Jewish people, and the putative legality of the process leading to the establishment of Israel in 1948–usually tendentiously citing the Balfour Declaration and UN Resolution 181. But critics of Zionism note properly that it inherently privileges Jews at the expense of Palestinians.

Should we not all the more condemn the religious view that Jews are the Chosen People, and that those in Israel inhabit a land given them specifically by God?

When it comes to attacking fundamental doctrines of faiths, tolerant people, ecumenical people, tend to draw a line. “People are entitled to their religious opinions,” they say, the idea being that these opinions are cultural, inherited, fixed and matters of identity. This has been my own attitude. I’ve figured: a child grows up in a household where he or she is told “God chose us to be the light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42:6).  Many Jewish parents add that, since Jews have been so historically oppressed in so many countries, they have a duty to stand with all the oppressed and the campaign against intolerance and the privileging of Christianity. The Jewish contribution to workers’ and anti-racist movements is well known, and it includes the contributions of those who’ve taken this Chosen People concept seriously.

I’ve been inclined towards anthropological indulgence. If I’ve smiled at the belief of some elderly Japanese that theirs is the “Land of the Gods” and they themselves are of special status in the world, such conviction resting on charming Shinto myth, can I not also smile good-naturedly at the biblical myth of the Chosen People?

No,  I can’t anymore.  Because the concept’s not harmless. It’s toxic, just as the claim to Japanese superiority based on State Shinto is potentially poisonous.  I can’t imagine a delusion with greater negative potential, more difficult to spin into something warm, fuzzy and mellow, than this notion of a “Chosen People.” Even if interpreted to mean, “We Jews have special ethical responsibilities because we were chosen by God,” doesn’t it, grounded in writings that exuberantly celebrate the annihilation of whole peoples, inevitably produce the ravings of a Rabbi Yosef?

Millions of fundamentalist Christians in this country, persuaded that the establishment of the modern Zionist state is in fulfillment of Bible prophecy, ignore the massive evidence for Israel’s brutal treatment of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine. They might be disconcerted by Yosef’s disparagement of non-Jews, Olmert’s boast about strong-arming Bush, or Netanyahu’s observation that their own uncritical support for Israel is really “absurd.” But because they buy the notion that there is a God, who “chose” Jews as “his people,” and granted them a land in perpetuity, they demand that their representatives in Congress rubber-stamp every Israeli action and endorse every Israeli request for funds or demand for U.S. action.

I suppose it’s possible to say to such people, and to believing Jews:

Ok, I respect your religious beliefs. I understand that you think today’s Jews are the lineal descendents of Abraham and that as such God has granted them the state of Israel in accordance with his promise and biblical prophecies. I understand that you believe Jews are special, appointed by God to be ‘a light unto the nations.

(To the Christian evangelicals one might add: “And I respect your view that in accordance with Book of Revelation prophecy, Israel has to be re-established before the Second Coming, Apocalypse, and Rapture.”)

All of that’s your business, just like it’s the Mormons’ business if they want to think a lost tribe of Israel settled in North America and Jesus appeared among them and delivered the Sermon on the Mount 2000 years ago. I personally think these views are totally irrational and historically unsupportable. But I know a lot of people hold them and they can be perfectly nice, decent people.

But can’t you find some way to reconcile those beliefs with a principled rejection of what, in any other context, would clearly be called ‘terror,’ ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘collective punishment,’ ‘war crimes’?

Can’t you acknowledge, as Israel’s best historians have done, that over 700,000 Palestinians fled in fear in 1948 after massacres in Deir Yassin and elsewhere? Can’t you confirm on the basis of just a little reading that Zionist leaders made their intention of driving them out very clear?

Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, said in 1948, ‘We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.’ Yitzak Rabin’s memoirs quote Ben Gurion as responding to a question about what to do with the Palestinians. ‘Ben Gurion responded with a hand gesture which said ‘Drive them out!’

Does your understanding of your religion justify all this? Do you think the God you believe in approved of all that, just to create a state of anti-Arab racists, self-absorbed religious fanatics, and disillusioned youth eager to repatriate, dependent on U.S. taxpayers’ largesse?

Can you ask yourself whether it was fair of the UN recommendation in 1947 to award 56% of the land in Palestine to Jews, who were only 33% of the population legally owning only 7% of the land? And was it wrong of the entire Arab and Muslim world to  reject that partition plan–authored by western powers who had colonized much of the world–as unacceptable? Can’t you understand why they would be reasonably opposed to it? And don’t you realize that the massacres at Deir Yassin and in Hebron occurred before the Arab armies even tried to intervene to prevent the emergence of a specifically Jewish state on disputed land?

Can’t you be a little more critical about how this Chosen People is treating the Palestinians in the Promised Land?

But I’m not that hopeful the appeals to reason and compassion can move the fundamentalist religious mind, once it’s fixed on a stance as a “matter of faith.” For many years the Israeli leaders’ not so secret weapon in influencing U.S. policy has been the Christian fundamentalists whom they privately disdain, but who accord them superstar status as God’s people doing God’s will.

These “useful idiots” do not understand that from the point of view of leading Zionists they exist, like donkeys, merely to serve the chosen ones. At least Rabbi Yosef states that viewpoint frankly. In doing so he challenges anyone willing to think to recognize what Israel’s all about–not the Sunday school myths but religiously-sanctified racism and atrocity.

On Thursday, October 28, intelligence officials in Saudi Arabia informed U.S. intelligence officials that UPS and FedEx packages carrying explosives had been mailed from Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, to Chicago via two airplanes. They provided the tracking numbers. (It was later revealed that they acted on a tip from a former member of al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP. He was subsequently identified by AP as Jabir al-Fayti, a Saudi national.) The UPS cargo plane stopped in Qatar, then Dubai, where local officials quickly discovered the device inside a Hewett-Packard printer. The FedEx cargo plane stopped at East Midlands Airport in England, where the other bomb was found. At 10:45 President Obama was briefed about the situation.

On Friday, cargo planes arriving in Philadelphia and Newark were searched, and in Brooklyn a UPS truck was stopped and inspected. No bombs or explosives were found. Meanwhile U.S. and Canadian fighter jets accompanied a passenger flight from the United Arab Emirates to New York, where the aircraft was searched. Nothing suspicious was found here either. In the afternoon Obama made a statement from the White House, praising U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism officials and declaring, “The events of the past 24 hours underscores the necessity of remaining vigilant against terrorism. The American people should be confidant that we will not waver in our resolve to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates and to root out violent extremism in all its forms.” He added that the packages had been mailed to “specifically two places of Jewish worship in Chicago.”

That night, according to the Chicago Tribune, the congregation of Or Chadash, a synagogue in the Edgewater neighborhood, was informed by its rabbi that “a reliable and well-placed Jewish community source” had reported that Or Chadash had been one of the targets. However, the newspaper also reported that “a source close to the investigation” had stated that the packages were addressed to synagogues in East Rogers Park and Lake View neighborhoods. Subsequent reports suggested that a small (100 member) lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender congregation called Or Chadash, which shares the Emmanuel synagogue in Lake View, was a target rather than the Edgewater synagogue.

On Friday the NYT also reported that  U.S. officials felt that “evidence is mounting” that AQAP, including New Mexico-born cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, were involved in the plot. They said they were “operating on the assumption” that AQAP bomb-maker, Ibrahim Hassan al-Asiri, had produced the bombs. (They had concluded he was also responsible for the explosives that “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed to detonate on the Northwest Airlines plane over Detroit last Christmas Day.) The argument was apparently based on the fact that the packages contained pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) such as the underwear bomber had carried. But “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid also attempted to blow up a passenger plane in December 2001 using PETN, and he had no connection to Yemen or al-Asiri. He received training in Afghanistan, which al-Asiri has apparently never visited.

John O’Brennan, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor, stated that investigators didn’t yet know how the explosives were supposed to be activated. “[T]here’s some question,” writes Huber, “not only as to whether al-Qaeda was behind the attempted airplane bombings, but as to whether any actual bombs were involved. The bomb they found in or around the plane in Dubai was similar to the package found in England, but maybe the package found in England wasn’t actually a bomb.”

On Saturday officials including Brennan praised the Saudi and Yemeni governments for their cooperation while Yemeni officials acting on a tip from U.S. officials arrested a woman suspected of delivering the packages to UPS and FedEx in Sana’a. The Department of Homeland Security dispatched a cable indicating that the packages may have been connected to the “Yemen-American Institute for Language-Computer Management” and the “American Center for Training” in Sana’a. The same day the Emmanuel synagogue rabbi told CNN that a Chicago Jewish source “well-connected to the authorities” had told him that his congregation hadn’t really been a target. (Are we then supposed to believe that the plan was to bomb the building only when the Or Chadash LGPT folks were using it?)

Meanwhile both British Home Minister Theresa May and Prime Minister David Cameron opined that the device on the plane that had arrived at the East Midlands Airport was designed to explode while the plane was flying. Brennen then stated during an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” Sunday morning:  “At this point we, I think, would agree with the British that it looks as though they were designed to be detonated in flight.” In other words, they weren’t targeting “two places of Jewish worship in Chicago” but cargo planes.

On Tuesday November 2, Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane of the NYT reported that the packages had been addressed to “Diego Deza” and “Reynald Krak.” The former was a notorious Grand Inquisitor during the Spanish Inquisition of the sixteenth century, who tortured people accused of being secret Muslims. The latter name is a rare variant of  Raynald of Chatillon, a French knight who slaughtered Muslims en route to Mecca as pilgrims during the Second Crusade in the twelfth century. (The chivalrous Muslim commander Saladin personally beheaded him as punishment.) The journalists called it a “sardonic choice” to include these “two dark inside jokes.”

But this raises the question of why AQAP would address the packages designed to explode in flight bringing down cargo planes to two Chicago synagogues under the names of two notorious enemies of Islam. Wouldn’t a package from Yemen, an unstable country intermittently targeted by U.S. drone-fired missiles, home of a group identified by U.S. officials as the greatest threat to U.S. security outside the “Af-Pak” border region, a country with only a handful of aging Jews, addressed to U.S. synagogues under the names chosen risk arousing suspicion? Wouldn’t the packages just be crying out, “Inspect me!”? If they were supposed to explode in flight anyway, wouldn’t it have made more sense to address them to some random street address under random names?

But let’s say packages were delivered to the two synagogues in Chicago, and did some damage. How would that help AQAP? Perhaps the cultural proclivity to demand “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” following the significant civilian death toll due to drone attacks might motivate this sort of response, especially given AQAP’s assumption that Jews direct U.S. foreign policy. But the organization surely knows that the powerful Israeli Lobby would suddenly press for more U.S. action in and against Yemen. Is that what it wants, to make Yemen another Afghanistan? It is possible that such a scenario fits in with a strategy of clearly pitting Islam against the west, and perhaps they figure that they could rally local support in the wake of a U.S. assault. But that is not at all clear at this point.

The involvement of al-Asiri seems taken for granted. But the underwear bomber’s device he is alleged to have designed was described by the world press as “crude,” and his effort to assassinate  the Saudi counter-terrorism chief Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in August 2009 was both crude and botched. (His suicide-bomber younger brother Abdullah, armed with three ounces of PETN in his anus—or some say, in his underwear—succeeded in blowing himself in half but only lightly injuring the prince.) Yet unnamed officials quoted in the Sunday NYT stated those on the cargo planes were “expertly constructed and unusually sophisticated.”  The Christian Science Monitor reports that officials think them “a big step up from two previous international bombing attempts” involving al-Asiri. How has the 28 year old King Saud University chemistry-major dropout hiding out somewhere in East Yemen so substantially honed his bomb making skills in the last 10 months?

And what about this Jabir al-Fayti? He’d had been captured in Afghanistan by U.S. forces, held at Guantanamo to 2007, released into Saudi custody where he completed a rehabilitation program, upon release joined AQAP in Yemen, then left AQAP to give himself up to Saudi authorities last September. They sent a private jet to Sana’a to pick him up, according to AP. You have to wonder who he’s really working for. The Saudis are known to be trying to infiltrate AQAP. The Saudis fear and detest AQAP and join with the U.S. in urging Yemen’s President, Ali Abdullah Saleh, beleaguered by two regional insurgencies more important to him than the two or three hundred AQAP militants in his country, to take firmer action against the small group. Might they wish to create an incident that would encourage Obama to strike harder at Yemen?

How did the Saudis get the tracking numbers so quickly? Did al-Fayti supply them? Or the name of the woman who had sent them? Or did he know the addresses and names of the addressees?

What about the arrested woman? Hanan al-Samawi is a 22 year old engineering student at Sana’a University who enjoys Western music and reads popular Western books. Detained Saturday on “a U.S. tip” she was released the following day when Yemeni police determined that someone had stolen her identity. Perhaps the real sender will never be known. What of the two language schools in Sana’a that Homeland Security was connecting to al-Qaeda? On Monday, November 1, the NYT indicated that neither institution seems to exist. There’s a U.S. State Department-run Yemen American Language Institute but its director said Monday that it never uses UPS or FedEx.

What is AQAP saying about all this? So far, nothing. That doesn’t mean it isn’t responsible; AQAP only took credit for a September 25 attack on a security bus in Yemen two weeks later (on October 9). But three days after the underwear bomber incident last year the group released a message claiming responsibility. A full week has gone by with no claim of responsibility by AQAP for the toner cartridge explosives.

What of the official security threat assessment? Homeland Security has pointedly avoided upping the color-coded “threat level” even as it warns of the need for greater cargo plane inspection. But the Defense Department mulls more drone attacks and the dispatch of what the Wall Street Journal recently termed “U.S. elite hunter-killer teams” controlled by the CIA on the ground in Yemen. All such measures could be justified as a prudent response to the aborted attacks. They have other uses too, such as making Obama look strong and efficient a couple days before the mid-term elections.

The incident strengthens and encourages all manner of war-mongers. The Weekly Standard’s, Thomas Jocelyn, manages to argue that this episode proves that U.S. torture of detainees at Guantanamo (including Yemenis, who have made up the largest group since January 2008) isn’t the “driving force behind AQAP’s terror” but rather “the terrorists’ jihadist ideology, which the Obama administration spends much of its time ignoring.” (So why worry about provoking ordinary Yemenis with drone missile attacks and the abuse of their countrymen when the underlying cause for hatred of the U.S. is Islamist “jihadism” from Afghanistan to Somalia?)

Liz Cheney, deputy secretary of state for Middle Eastern affairs under the Bush/Cheney administration, appeared on Fox News to argue that al-Qaeda was probing “the weakest spot in our system” by targeting cargo planes and that “that’s why intelligence becomes so important. It’s why I believe that the steps that this president has taken, for example, threatening to prosecute intelligence officials, are so dangerous and damaging for the nation. It’s why the Wikileaks, the leaks are so damaging.”

Cognitive dissonance aside, the reportage on this episode has been fraught with contradictions, leaves many unanswered questions, and serves the interests of those bent on perpetuating and expanding wars based on lies and fear.

“We have heard that a half million children have died,” stated Stahl. “I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think this is a very hard choice,” replied Albright, “but the price–we think the price is worth it.”

Albright, who served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, had a cruel disregard for the lives of Iraqis, Serbs, and others. But she apparently had a callous attitude towards the lives of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen too. In his new memoir, General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997 to 2001, writes about a White House breakfast in late 1997. (The account is cited by Justin Elliott in Salon.)

Early on in my days as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, we had small, weekly White House breakfasts in National Security Advisor Sandy Berger’s office that included me, Sandy, Bill Cohen (Secretary of Defense), Madeleine Albright (Secretary of State), George Tenet (head of the CIA), Leon Firth (VP chief of staff for security), Bill Richardson (ambassador to the U.N.), and a few other senior administration officials. These were informal sessions where we would gather around Berger’s table and talk about concerns over coffee and breakfast served by the White House dining facility. It was a comfortable setting that encouraged brainstorming of potential options on a variety of issues of the day.

During that time we had U-2 aircraft on reconnaissance sorties over Iraq. These planes were designed to fly at extremely high speeds and altitudes (over seventy thousand feet) both for pilot safety and to avoid detection.

At one of my very first breakfasts, while Berger and Cohen were engaged in a sidebar discussion down at one end of the table and Tenet and Richardson were preoccupied in another, one of the Cabinet members present leaned over to me and said, “Hugh, I know I shouldn’t even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event — something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s fly low enough — and slow enough — so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?”

The hair on the back of my neck bristled, my teeth clenched, and my fists tightened. I was so mad I was about to explode. I looked across the table, thinking about the pilot in the U-2 and responded, “Of course we can …” which prompted a big smile on the official’s face.

“You can?” was the excited reply.

“Why, of course we can,” I countered. “Just as soon as we get your ass qualified to fly it, I will have it flown just as low and slow as you want to go.”

The official reeled back and immediately the smile disappeared. “I knew I should not have asked that….”

“No, you should not have,” I strongly agreed, still shocked at the disrespect and sheer audacity of the question. “Remember, there is one of our great Americans flying that U-2, and you are asking me to intentionally send him or her to their death for an opportunity to kick Saddam. The last time I checked, we don’t operate like that here in America.”

Imagine that! A Cabinet official suggesting a deliberate provocation endangering a military pilot’s life in order to justify a war: “…but what we really need in order to go in and take out Saddam is a precipitous event — something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world.” Is this mere amoral pragmatism? Machiavellianism? It is in any case evil.

(I’m reminded of how the key neocon text “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” authored by Paul Wolfowitz for the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) “thinktank” in Sept. 2000, states that the “process of transformation” to the kind of super-militarized aggressive state the neocons hoped for “will be a long one absent some catastrophic event like a new Pearl Harbor.” And as the Deputy Secretary of Defense he warned of another Pearl Harbor in his speech at West Point in June 2001. After 9-11, widely compared in the media to the Pearl Harbor attack of 1941, he immediately set about preparations for war with Iraq.)

On January 31, 2003 President George W. Bush in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair seriously proposed provoking Saddam to shoot down a U.S. aircraft. According to notes taken my Blair advisor David Manning (the accuracy of which has never been challenged), Bush suggested “flying U-2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted with UN colors. If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach” of UN resolutions. Maybe then the UN, which had refused to endorse the plan to attack Iraq and was sceptical about the justifications given by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, would endorse war. (Perhaps the military brass opposed the plan, which was never carried out.)

At the Clinton White House breakfast described by Gen. Shelton, Berger, Cohen, Tenet and Richardson were involved in separate conversations. The other cabinet members were Robert E. Rubin (Treasury), Janet Reno (Attorney General), Bruce Babbit (Interior), Dan Glickman (Agriculture), Mickey Kantor (Commerce), Alexis Herman (Labor), Donna E. Shalala (Health and Human Services), Andrew M. Cuomo (Housing and Urban Development), Rodney Slater (Transportation), Richard W. Riley (Education), Jesse Brown (Veteran’s Affairs), Federico F. Pena (Energy), and Albright.

Out the 14 members of the Cabinet, there were four women. The fact that Shelton deliberately avoids indicating the gender of his interlocutor may hint that it was one of them. It is hard to believe that Attorney General Reno would suggest sacrificing an airman to the head of the Joint Chiefs at a White House breakfast. Or the Secretary of Labor, or Secretary of Health and Human Services. It’s hard to believe anyone on the above list would so–except Albright.

Albright in her memoirs expresses regret for her “it was worth it” statement in the 1996 interview. And she told Newsweek in 2006, “I’m afraid that Iraq is going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy—worse than Vietnam.” But she bears partial responsibility for the December 1998 bombing of Iraq (“Operation Desert Fox”), a prelude to the 2003 invasion. She helped produce the disaster.

And she helped produce disaster in the former Yugoslavia. As violence rose in the Serbian province of Kosovo, between the Kosovo Liberation Army and security forces, she (and Cohen) deliberately exaggerated the Kosovar Albanian death toll and demanded the U.S. right to intervene. She arranged the de facto alliance with the KLA, earlier labelled “terrorist” by U.S. officials. In March 1999 at the Rambouillet talks between Serbia and the Kosovar rebels, along with the U.S., its European allies and Russia, the U.S. demanded that the whole of Serbia (and other states within what was left of Yugoslavia) submit to virtual occupation by NATO. Yugoslavia had proudly remained outside the Warsaw Pact and had prided itself on participation in the Non-Aligned Movement. No government in Belgrade could have complied with Albright’s demands.

The so-called Rambouillet Agreement was rejected outright by the Serbs as well as their Russian allies. But Albright immediately stated, “We accept the agreement”–as though there was any agreement. The bullying was conducted in such a smug fashion that the French Foreign minister accused the U.S. of becoming a hyperpuissance–not a mere superpower but a “hyperpower.”

John Pilger wrote, “Anyone scrutinizing the Rambouillet document is left with little doubt that the excuses given for the subsequent bombing were fabricated. The peace negotiations were stage managed and the Serbs were told: surrender and be occupied, or don’t surrender and be destroyed.”

This was indeed Albright’s plan (and that of Bill Clinton, egged on by Hillary, who has confessed, “I urged him to bomb”), resulting in the deployment of NATO to bomb a European capital for the first time since 1945, killing at least 500 civilians (Human Rights Watch) and maybe ten times that number.

A Republican official later told a think tank that a certain “top official” had told him: “ We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that’s what they are going to get.” Don’t we see a pattern here?

Throughout the last decade the neoconservatives have been the leading warmongers. But they have no monopoly on imperialist arrogance, contempt for truth and indifference to human life. Madeleine Albright is proof of that.

But it is interesting and pleasing to note that many Israeli Jews are up in arms about the cabinet decision to force non-Jewish immigrants to pledge loyalty to a “Jewish state.” These include former Foreign Minister and head of the opposition Kadima party Tzipi Livni (Kadima) who calls the decision “politics at its worst,” adding, “The delicate and important topic of a Jewish and democratic state has turned into commercialized politics, and it is totally unnecessary. The central thing we need to protect is Israel’s existence as Jewish and equal for all of its citizens.” Minister of Welfare Isaac Herzog (of the Labor Party) calls it a step towards fascism. Even Likud Ministers Benny Begin and Dan Meridor warn it will harm relations with Israeli Arabs. Writer Sefi Rachlevsky, who organized a protest against the law, declares: “At the moment that you ask that everyone agree to this same belief, you are a fascist state,” adding, “every national catastrophe begins with decisions like this.”

Journalists throughout the world routinely refer to Israel as “the Jewish state.” The Declaration of Independence of 1948 defines Israel as a “Jewish Nation state.” The Basic Laws of Israel (which substitute for a constitution) define it as “a Jewish and democratic state.” Some people in this country wonder what the fuss is all about. The current U.S. Oath of Allegiance required of new citizens requires them to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic.” Why is it so controversial in Israel and elsewhere to require (say) the Norwegian Lutheran husband of a Jewish Israeli woman to pledge loyalty to the Basic Laws of Israel which define it as a Jewish state?

One George Dargo in a letter to the editor in the Boston Globe addresses the problem. “The phrase itself [Jewish and democratic] is an oxymoron. How can a state openly favor one ethnic group above all others and declare itself to be democratic? …Israel must decide whether it wishes to favor a single religious-ethnic [group] or be truly democratic. It cannot have it both ways.”

I think there are two issues worth exploring. One is the demographic issue much on Netanyahu’s mind. Over 20% of all Israeli citizens are Arabs and about 5% other non-Jews such as Armenians, Circassians, Assyrians etc., or non-Jewish spouses and other family members of Jews who’ve acquired Israeli citizenship. As of 2008 only 75.5% of Israelis were Jewish. Given the fact that the Arab birthrate is twice that of Israeli Jews, and that immigration to Israel has slowed while emigration has surged, that figure is probably lower now. One study suggests that in Israel (excluding the occupied territories) Arabs will be 25% of the population in 20 years. They’re already a majority of the population in the north of Israel.

Over half the Jewish population increase in recent decades has been due to immigration. During some years in the nineties, over 100,000 Russian Jews (and non-Jewish family members) arrived in Israel, whereas last year the total number of immigrants from around the world was around just 50,000. (This is one reason Israeli leaders like to exaggerate the degree of anti-Semitism in France and other European countries, urging European Jews to flee and come to Israel.) And now tens of thousands of Israeli Jews are leaving the country every year. Indeed in some recent years (including 2007) emigrants have exceeded immigrants.

If one looks at Israel plus the Occupied Territories, Jews and Arabs are roughly matched at 50/50. The Arab figure is up from 30% in 1970. A Haifa University researcher estimates that it will climb to 57% by 2020. Given the long-term goal of the Israeli right and the influential settler movement to ultimately annex the West Bank outright, Jews will become a minority in Israel/Palestine. Benjamin Netanyahu has been warning since at least 2003 of the “demographic threat.”

Israeli leaders reject the universal Right to Return as codified in the in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which allows anyone to re-enter their country of origin. Meanwhile they maintain their own Law of Return which states that any Jew anywhere can immediately become Israeli. Having driven out over 700,000 Arabs through terror in 1948, the Israeli state cannot comply with repeated UN resolutions requiring their admission of those refugees and descendents. Israeli leaders are quite frank about the matter; they say the demographic shift would alter the character of the Jewish state. Which of course it would, to the world’s benefit!

This is their bad karma. Their Jewish state that produced so much Arab suffering and displacement at its inception, that has through the occupation of more Arab land generated more pain and rage, is vulnerable to these demographic forces. More threatening than the suicide bomber is what Israeli leaders call the “time bomb” of human procreation. This demand that everyone accept Israel as a specifically Jewish state seems a reaction to the fact that Israel in fact becomes progressively less Jewish. It seems an effort to legitimatize, by whatever means necessary in the future (such as the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank), the maintenance of a Jewish majority.

Fortunately Israelis are divided, some comfortable with ethnic and religious diversity–such has become the norm in the western world–and some insisting on privileging Jews (despite the fact that the Basic Laws insure ethnic and religious equality.)

This new loyalty oath will not apply to Israeli Arabs. It will anger them, but they will not have to take it. It will largely affect non-Jewish, non-Palestinian spouses of Jews. What if my hypothetical Norwegian Lutheran immigrant, joining a spouse who has a lucrative job in Tel Aviv, finds the rampant anti-Arab racism revealed in Israeli public opinion polls repugnant, opposes the power of the rabbinate over many secular matters, and would like to work as a new Israeli citizen towards the reform of Israeli society? The loyalty oath tells him he must accept inferior guest status as a non-Jew. It is like asking the Nigerian immigrant to the U.S. not just to uphold the Constitution but to pledge loyalty to the U.S. as a state that is “white Christian and democratic.”

(Of course the U.S. is like Israel a settler-state, established by white Europeans at the expense of the native people, just as modern Israel was. It was formed out of colonies established by settlers who–often citing Old Testament accounts of the “Promised Land” and the annihilation of the Canaanites ordered by God–bear some resemblances to the Zionists of the 1940s. And it is about 75% Christian, just as Israel is 75% Jewish. But the current state does not rub the immigrant’s nose in that fact nor insult Native Americans by doing so. The U.S. in other words officially makes no assumptions about the ethnic or religious composition of the country, which is getting less and less “white,” and is not asking the new people to pledge allegiance to a white America.)

The second issue is the question of what it means to be a Jew, entitled automatically to inclusion in a specifically Jewish state. Jewishness (as opposed to Judaism) is a complicated category. (Similarly, “Arab” is a complicated category. It refers to a wide range of ethnic types loosely united in language and culture, and the general acceptance of Islam, although there are many Christian and even some Arab Jews.)

Jews are an ethnic group, or cluster of ethnic groups, including both religious and non-religious people. Some of the greatest minds of the modern world (Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, not to mention Carl Sagan, Jacques Derrida, etc.) were non-believing or atheistic Jews. Theodor Herzl himself, founder of the Zionist movement, had little interest in religion. The Law of Return allows Jewish atheists, agnostics or converts to other faiths to acquire citizenship on the basis of bloodline alone. Over a third of Israeli Jews are agnostics or atheists.

Up until 1970, the Law of Return granted citizenship to children of Jewish mothers only (under what’s called the halakhic definition of Jew.) In 1970 the law was revised to allow citizenship for any “child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew, except for a person who has been a Jew and has voluntarily changed his religion.” That last part was changed when the High Court of Justice ruled in 2008 that Jews espousing Christianity were entitled to citizenship. Thus criteria for citizenship have been broadening, partly due to Israeli’s need to combat the Palestinian “demographic threat.”

The concept behind the Law of Return is that Jews are a people whose distant ancestors at some point lived in what is now Israel. According to the biblical narrative, God promised the patriarch Abraham, who had journeyed with his flocks and wives from Iraq to Israel, that this would be the land of his descendents. God repeated the promise to Abraham’s son Isaac and grandson Jacob. Jacob’s son Joseph was sold into slavery in Egypt, where the Hebrews became a great people, were enslaved and after a series of miracles liberated to wander towards the Promised Land led by Moses. Joshua then led them in smiting the native people, the Canaanites, wiping them out to establish Hebrew control and the eventual creation of a kingdom under Saul, then David, then Solomon. In the sixth century the kingdom of Judah was defeated by the Babylonians and the Jews were carried off into exile, but reestablishing their presence in Israel within the century (due to the kindness of the Persian emperor Cyrus). There they remained until uprisings against Roman rule in the late first and early second centuries produced the Diaspora, the forced dispersion of the Judeans throughout the world, where they faced constant discrimination and hardship.

Israeli leaders and the Israel Lobby in this country exploit the beliefs of Christian fundamentalists who believe all this, see Bible prophecy fulfilled in the establishment of Israel, and firmly endorse the Jewish “birthright” concept. They privately laugh at such supporters, with their belief that the re-establishment of Israel presages the Second Coming of Christ and all that, while they appreciate the valuable political support the evangelical Christians provide them in the U.S. But I doubt that many Israeli leaders believe the Bible tales. These comprise a colorful series of stories that has little or no relationship to historical reality, as some Israeli archeologists and even rabbis have pointed out. (For example, there is no evidence for Hebrew presence in Egypt at the time Moses was supposed to have lived.) Quite likely a collection of Semitic tribes formed a loose confederation in Canaan 3000 years ago and gradually composed the tales which scribes set down beginning in the 9th century BCE, continuously revising them into the 5th century or so.

What the tales really show is a lot of imagination and a lot of cultural influence from Mesopotamia and Egypt, no doubt the result of trade. But Israeli leaders, whether or not they talk of a land promised by God to a chosen people, do promote the idea that people with Jewish ancestry have a “birthright” to Israeli citizenship. They are returning to the land of their ancestors. This itself is an entirely faith-based proposition.

Hard truth: not all of the Jews of the twenty-first century are necessarily the descendents of those driven from Roman Judea at the time of the Diaspora. In all likelihood lots of Judeans remained in what was already a variegated society including Syrians, Greeks, Romans, and others, and many of these Palestinian Jews later converted to Christianity or Islam. That is to say: many Judeans never left and some present-day Palestinians carry more of their DNA than your typical European Jew.

Meanwhile there was considerable conversion of Gentiles to Judaism in the Roman Empire as of the time of St. Paul (mid-1st century). There were Jews dispersed all over the Empire before the Diaspora, many voluntarily, pursuing trade. When you read St. Paul’s epistles, you realize that in Roman times there were synagogues all over what is now Turkey, Greece, Italy and beyond. Every major trade hub, such as Corinth in Greece or Ephesus on the Anatolian coast, had a synagogue in the 50s CE.

Today we don’t see Judaism as a missionary religion, but these synagogues welcomed attendance by interested Gentiles. The Old Testament had been available in Greek translation since the third century BCE and many non-Jews read and were impressed by it. A significant number of Gentile men took the big step and got themselves circumcised. In other words, there are Jews descended from Galatians (a Celtic people), Thessalonians (Macedonians), Greeks and Romans whose earliest Jewish ancestors probably never set foot on Palestinian soil.

And many others, from Ethiopia to India. The kingdom of the Khazars in southern Russia converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages and its (Turkic) people contributed to the gene pool of people following the Jewish faith. Many Ashkenazi Jews are likely descended from them. They have no more “right” to “return” to Palestinian land appropriated from Palestinians than I do.

(There is an organization called “Birthright Israel” initiated by the Israeli government in 1994 that visits college campuses and offers free 10-day tours of Israel to Jewish students. It is of course an effort to encourage immigration to Israel and build sympathy for it. My college student son, of Japanese, Norwegian, Swedish, Swiss, and Irish ancestry, in that order, approached someone from the group, asking “Can I go?” He’d love to visit Israel for free! He was told of course he can’t because he’s not Jewish so it’s not his birthright. He could have said, “Well the Swiss Leupps are related to the Leopoldi Austrian Jews and so I do have Jewish ancestry”–which may in fact be true. But he just laughed in their faces at the ridiculousness of the concept. He and I have a right to visit the Swiss township where my Leupp ancestors have lived since the sixteenth century. But it’s not a “birthright,” just normal tourism that we have to self-finance. The whole concept of “Birthright Israel” feeds delusion and I think campuses should discourage it. Or at least insist that it fund visits by Palestinians and Palestinian-Americans–who’ve been denied their birthright–studying in the visited schools as well. Shouldn’t the grandchild of someone from Hebron who had to flee during the Nakhba have a birthright to go back for 10 days, all expenses paid, along with the Jewish youth who have no idea about when their ancestors possibly lived in the “Jewish homeland”? )

Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, who teaches at Tel Aviv University, published a book two years ago, now available in English. In The Invention of the Jewish People he argues that there has never been a Jewish “people” per se but only a religion. He contends that Jewish communities cropped up in Yemen, North Africa, Spain and the Caucasus with no relationship to the Judeans who once lived in what is now Israel. He undercuts “the case for Israel” and endorses a one-state solution. The demand that new non-Jewish citizens pledge loyalty to a “Jewish and democratic” state is to place them on record as rejecting this type of historical understanding or favoring that one-state resolution. It is a demand for ideological conformity. Sefi Rachlevsky is right to declare, “At the moment that you ask that everyone agree to this same belief, you are a fascist state.”

Palestinian Knesset member Ahmed Tibi (whom Likud and other right-wing politicians in Israel have tried to disqualify from office) says the cabinet has “turned into the stooge of Israel Beiteinu [the party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman] and its fascist doctrine. There is no country in the world that forces its citizens or those naturalizing to swear their loyalty to ideology or a sectarian obligation. Israel is proving that it is not egalitarian and is in fact democratic for Jews and Jewish for Arabs.”

But it is good to see some Israeli Jews challenging the decision.

Some Bible scholars think these were words for coins circulating in the empire, or measures of metal used in commerce. (Tekel is the same as the Hebrew shekel.) So the message was something like, “Dollars, dollars, quarters, half dollars.”

What could it mean, wondered Balshazzar and his courtiers? The emperor’s advisors were mystified. So Daniel, a wise man among the Jews of the Babylonian Exile who enjoyed the favor of the court, was called upon to interpret the meaning of this amazing event.

Daniel explained that God was using clever puns involving money to foretell the empire’s doom. Mene (or mina) can mean “measured” or “numbered” as well as “judged.” Tekel (or shekel) can mean “weighed on the scales.” Upharsin is a coin one-half the size of a mene, but also is a pun for “Persian.” So Daniel told Balshazzar:

This is the interpretation of the matter: MENE, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; TEKEL, you have been weighed on the scales and found wanting; UPHARSIN, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians. (Daniel 5:25)

Indeed that very night the emperor was slain and a Mede (Darius) became ruler. Soon the empire was conquered by Cyrus the Persian.

The Book of Daniel was written in the second century BCE. It refers to rulers who lived four centuries earlier and shouldn’t be taken literally. The first half is an exquisitely written novelette in which Daniel “prophesizes” things that had already occurred. The Babylonian Empire had been succeeded by the Median, Persian, and then following the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Greek empire. (And then the Romans gradually build their empire, doomed to decline.)

Earlier in the Book of Daniel (2:31-45), the Babylonian emperor Nebuchadnezzar asks Daniel to explain to him the meaning of a dream involving a statue with a head of gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs from brass, legs of iron, and feet part iron and clay. Daniel explains that Nebudchadnezzar is himself the head of gold but “after you shall arise another kingdom inferior to yours, and yet a third kingdom of bronze, which shall rule over the whole earth.” These are often interpreted to mean the succession of Median, Persian, and Greek empires. The last was ruling the Middle East at the time this book was written. The author wanted to say that while the Greeks ruling Judea appeared powerful, they were fundamentally weak. (This is what the phrase “feet of clay” has come to mean.)

The whole point is: empires eventually fall. (Their decline and fall is just a particularly dramatic example of what Buddhists call “the law of impermanence.”) One doesn’t have to suppose that a deity oversees human events to acknowledge the historical fact that no empire is forever.

And the handwriting is indeed on the wall. This what the moving finger writes today, on walls in the halls of power all over Washington and on Wall Street:

Mene, mene. Your days are numbered.

Your dollar’s value is falling. Between 2000 and 2009 it fell by 33% in relation to the euro and 23% to the yen. And your share in the global GDP is declining. The EU now leads the U.S., according to IMF figures, at 28% of the total. The U.S. produces 25% and China and Japan together 17%. In 1945 the U.S. figure was around 50% of the total. It was over 30% in 2000. You must accept the inevitability of further decline.

Teke. You have been weighed on the scales and found wanting.

Poll after poll show that the world’s people find your government morally lacking—indeed viciously brutal in pursuit of its imperialist goals. There has been no change in policy between the Bush and Obama administrations. Your government slaughters civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, increasingly through the cowardly use of drone-fired missiles. You refuse to punish those responsible for cruel wars based on lies. You say you will pressure Israel to get its settlers out of the West Bank, then you back off, because of the power of the Israel Lobby. Your Congress actually congratulates Israel when it blitzkriegs Gaza or attacks an aid ship in international waters killing nine unarmed people including a U.S. citizen. Everyone knows you lie, and cover up atrocities. You have zero moral credibility in this world.

Upharsim. Your kingdom is divided.

Your society is deeply, bitterly divided. Income inequality has been increasing since the 1970s and is the highest in the industrialized world, resembling the situation as of 1929. The top 1% of households own at least 35% of all privately held wealth and the bottom 80% of households just 15% of the wealth. The poverty level is back to 1960s (pre-“War on Poverty”) level while the number of millionaires—many of them finance capitalists deliberately exploiting investors’ and home-buyers’ gullibility–soars.

Whether your country will retain its current borders, or split up like Balshazzar’s empire, remains to be seen. But the class division is very real, and the struggle of those most hurt in your society may help bring your empire down.

Such is the handwriting on the wall. “The moving finger writes,” wrote the great eleventh century Persian poet Omar Khayyam (who had read Daniel and was alluding to the story of the handwriting on the wall).

Nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it.

The empire will fade and decline, like the Roman and Spanish and British and Soviet, and all other empires before it. Pious evangelicals and Harvard academicians can’t save it.

I thought about the Daniel story while reading an article in the most recent issue of the American Conservative. It cites a Chicago Council of Global Affairs survey that reported “a majority of Americans is taking a very sensible view of how activist and interventionist the U.S. should be in the future. There appears to be much more acceptance of relative decline in U.S. preeminence and the rise of more independent powers….”

Specifically, a large majority thinks the U.S. shouldn’t be the “world’s policeman,” shouldn’t try to “solve problems” unilaterally, and welcome the fact that countries like Turkey and Brazil are becoming more independent of the U.S. in the conduct of their foreign policy. They think that rather than trying to limit China’s power the U.S. should engage it and cooperate with it in a friendly way.

I find the report encouraging. Perhaps people are thinking: What is wrong with allowing others to emerge and share center stage? We’re tired of being in charge of the world.

The neoconservative strategy following the Cold War has been to allow no rival, to maintain global “supremacy” or “full spectrum dominance.” But how can you do that when China (a generally peaceful power, that happens to own almost a quarter of the U.S. national debt) threatens to surpass the U.S. in economic clout within 20 years?

Indeed what is wrong with becoming a Britain or a Spain, or a France or a Holland or Japan? Generally speaking, people in these countries don’t lament the decline of their empires. Few Japanese want to revive the empire that once extended from Sakhalin to Samoa. They’re content to live in a normal peaceful country that cooperates with others.

I don’t want to idealize any of these advanced capitalist countries. They remain imperialist in the Leninist sense. Their capitalists export capital in search of the highest possible rate of profit, and they seek to control markets and raw materials. They cooperate with the U.S. in its wars of aggression. They are governed by people whom we can judge seriously “wanting” and are all in need of radical change. But they have experienced “relative decline” and lived through it—as the people of this country can.

Early in this country’s history settlers identified with the ancient Hebrews led out of Egypt into the “Promised Land” of Canaan. They thought that (just as the Hebrews had taken the land of the Canaanites, annihilating them in the process at God’s command) so God had given North America to white Europeans. It was their right to take it from the native “savages.” At the time of the Mexican War, the vast expansion of the republic through military aggression was justified by the “Manifest Destiny” concept. Obviously it was the destiny of Anglo-Saxons to occupy the continent, from sea to shining sea—and it didn’t stop at the beach. Jingoists crowed that it was inevitable that the Stars and Stripes would be planted across the sea, on the soil of Asia. This of course was soon realized in the Treaty Ports of Japan, after Japan had been bullied into opening them by Admiral Perry’s threatening visits of 1853-4. And the flag was raised on the soil of the Philippines in 1898 when the former Spanish colony was seized by the U.S. There have always been plenty of (white) people of this country who’ve thought they were special and had the right to brutalize inferior peoples. Or at least tell them what to do.

But why not just realize and say: We’re just a country like other countries. Or we would like to be. We reached our peak half a century ago and are now in decline. And that is okay. During the period of peak prosperity U.S. military forces killed millions of Koreans and Vietnamese in order to maintain and expand the empire. This is nothing to be proud of. In our Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union we armed and trained tens of thousands of Islamist warriors to wage jihad against a secularist regime in Afghanistan, creating in the process groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

You can get thrown into the lion’s den for saying this, but the deeds of the U.S. have come back to haunt us. There are drawbacks to being an imperialist, bloodstained superpower.

Why does the U.S., protected by two vast oceans and peaceful borders with friendly nations, with no significant military rivals, need an empire of 700 bases in 130 countries? Why does it need to pretend to be “protecting” people (as in Okinawa) who haven’t asked for their presence and ask who’s protecting them from the U.S. troops? People who are asking them to please leave?

Why does the U.S. need to constantly topple regimes posing no threat to itself, always on the basis of lies? Why does it need to bully its allies (whose people want nothing to do with the Iraq and Afghan wars) to get support, or to maintain an alliance (NATO) that has long outlived its original Cold War purpose? Why must it insist on dominance? In whose interest is all this?

The U.S. ruling elite—including the neocons, the oil barons, the crooked traders, the Pentagon generals in arms with the arms industry, the idiot politicians who always vote the way AIPAC tells them to, the whole rung of top capitalists profiting from the bailout—are like the revelers at Balshazzar’s banquet. They are arrogant plunderers, drinking toasts to the gods of gold and silver in stolen goblets.

But maybe the party’s over. Fortunately, a system that is illogical and indefensible is also unsustainable. The Crash of 2008 suggests this, along with failure in two imperialist wars. I’d come over the years to doubt Marx’s conviction that the overthrow of capitalism was “inevitable,” but it remains my hope. And it will happen when people awaken to the fact that, as Engels once declared (in connection with German occupation of parts of Poland), a nation that oppresses other nations cannot become free. The “greater acceptance of decline” suggests that this truth is dawning on more and more people in this country.

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsim.

I don’t know how accurate the statistic is, but my gut feeling is that it’s probably pretty accurate. And profoundly depressing. Have people forgotten that this war was fought, not for such reasons, but to destroy Saddam Hussein’s (alleged) weapons of mass destruction and end his (supposed) cooperation with al-Qaeda?

Have they forgotten how terrified the Bush administration made them, with carefully calculated talking points? (For example: “Let’s hope the smoking gun isn’t a mushroom cloud over New York City.”) With all the insane color-coded threat advisories, and all the Orwellian manipulation, in the background? With the “Information Awareness Office” under Adm. Poindexter, seemingly modeled after the surveillance system in the former East Germany, making all thinking people uneasy? With Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer saying–after comedian Bill Maher opined matter-of-factly that whatever else they were the 9-11 hijackers weren’t “cowards”–“All Americans need to watch what they say”?

Have they forgotten that no weapons of mass destruction were ever found, and that a bipartisan Senate committee concluded that there were in fact no links between Saddam and al-Qaeda? Don’t they recall that–as Senator John Rockefeller, the Committee’s ranking Democrat, put it–“the administration’s repeated allegations of a past, present and future relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq were wrong and intended to exploit the deep sense of insecurity among Americans in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks”?

Immediately after the 9-11 attacks, the Bush administration began plans for an invasion of Iraq. These plans were driven by neoconservatives holding key second-tier positions in the Defense Department and in the Office of the Vice President. (Recall that Cheney was the most powerful vice president ever, had enormous influence over Bush, headed up the transition office that selected the new administration’s top officials, and had–following that stolen election of 2000–seeded the government with neoconservatives.) Neocon Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense (58), held nearly as much power as his boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (69). He made Iraq War preparations his main task after 9-11. It was his passion.

Rumsfeld suggested the very day after 9-11 that the U.S. attack Iraq because there were no “good targets” in Afghanistan, where 2 of the 19 hijackers had, it was eventually announced, trained. (None were Iraqi.) He wrote a memo to aides to get “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H. (Saddam Hussein) at same time. Not only UBL (Osama bin Laden). Go massive.” “Sweep it all up,” he told aides, “Things related and not.” In other words: Use this opportunity to build a case for invading Iraq, even if it had no relation to 9-11. (Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security advisor, frankly stated that the 9-11 events provided “opportunities.”)

Meanwhile Bush took aside his counterterrorism advisor Richard Clarke and in what the latter says was “a very intimidating way” asked him to “find whether Iraq did this.” When Clarke said, “there’s no connection,” Bush repeated the demand that he find one. The administration also stoked fears that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks. (It wasn’t.)

When the intelligence community was unable to establish Iraq-al-Qaeda links of any significance, Wolfowitz appointed neocons Abram Shulsky and Douglas Feith to set up an “Office of Special Plans” (OFP) in the Pentagon to circumvent the intelligence professionals and manufacture evidence for Iraq-al-Qaeda ties, and for weapons of mass destruction. Virtually all the assertions they came up with (drones capable of delivering WMDs, mobile chemical weapons labs, al-Qaeda flight training center, Niger uranium purchase [which one former intelligence official attributes to neocon Michael Ledeen], sponsorship of the Islamist terrorist al-Zarqawi, etc.) were subsequently discredited. They were manufactured lies allowing Bush (in September 2002) to declare, “You can’t distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam.”

Secretary of State Colin Powell, called upon to make the case for war to the United Nations, actually exploded in indignation at one point prior to his presentation saying, “I’m not reading this. This is bullshit.”

Maybe the best example of the bullshit was neocon Richard Perle’s baseless statement to an Italian journalist in 2002 that 9-11 hijacker “Mohammed Atta met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad prior to September 11. We have proof of that, and we are sure he wasn’t just there for a holiday. The meeting is one of the motives of an American attack on Iraq.” Perle was at the time the chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board, a position that–not that this means much–doesn’t require congressional approval. There is in fact no proof of any such meeting, or rational basis to think it happened. Perle like all the neocon ideologues lies as a matter of principle. His good buddy Ahmad Chalabi having spoon-fed disinformation to the OFP proclaimed, after his lies were exposed, “We are heroes in error.” In other words, we lied heroically to obtain our end, the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Powell now regrets having been used by the “little government” within the government centering around Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz that drove the plans for war. (I don’t say that to defend him. I think he’s an amoral opportunist. He helped cover up the My Lai Massacre, after all, in 1968. I’m just pointing out he felt troubled about being the one to deliver these lies before the UN General Assembly about a “sinister nexus” between Iraq and al-Qaeda. He now feels it’s a blot on his career history. He reportedly joked nervously with British officials about possible war crimes trials in the future.)

Many in the professional intelligence community still resent the visits of Cheney and his chief aide (and neocon) “Scooter” Libby to the Pentagon to browbeat them into altering their reports on Iraq. It was absolutely unprecedented for a vice president (usually the vice presidency is a ceremonial position) to take a keen interest in the production of intelligence reports, or to demand that very questionable material be included in those reports. Even if the CIA was convinced that some report from neocons’ informants such as Ahmad Chalabi, Ayad Allawi or Rafid Ahmed Alwan (“Curveball”) was totally worthless, Cheney and Libby urged them to include it, at least indicating that some people thought the information valid. That was the scheme–to countermand objective intelligence reports with deliberate disinformation to give Bush his alibi for war.

The White House Iraq Group (WHIG) headed by White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and chaired by Bush’s senior advisor Karl Rove coordinated the PR campaign. (Rove entered political life as a college student, at age 19 stealing 1000 sheets of Democratic Party campaign letterhead and circulating fake campaign fliers to damage a Democratic candidate. The documentary Bush’s Brain tells the whole nasty story.) Card came up with the line: “Let’s hope the smoking gun isn’t a mushroom cloud over New York City.”

The New York Times, itself a proponent of the war, noted that Bush had a “meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress, and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.” It quoted Card, after Labor Day in 2002, explaining why the case for war was only made in September: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” The case for war was marketed.

The WHIG group deliberately played upon fear. As the Downing Street memos show, British intelligence was well aware as of July 2002 that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” (In other words, the U.S. had decided to invade, and was creating bogus intelligence in order to justify doing so.)

Shouldn’t all this be obvious by now to thinking people in this country?

Wolfowitz–in an unguarded moment, demonstrating the cavalier attitude and contempt for truth of these neocons–told Vanity Fair in 2003, “for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason.” In other words, having decided to go to war, they debated among themselves how to justify it to the people, and most thought the weapons charge would be most effective.

How Joseph Goebbels would have admired their procedure!

Please, you 58%! The U.S. “did the right thing”? Invading a sovereign country already crippled by sanctions, which Powell had assured reporters earlier in 2001 was not a threat to the U.S.? (He’d said “We have [Saddam] contained, kept him in his box.”) No way! It was so, so wrong. And the ongoing occupation is wrong.

It’s normal in warfare to use disinformation against the enemy. Maybe you make him think you’re going to attack from the west, so he’ll divert troops and you’ll attack him from the east. The neocons however use disinformation against the people of their own country (or one of their countries, since many are dual US-Israeli nationals). They employ the concept of the “Noble Lie” in order to attain their ends.

They knew Bush wanted war. He’d said in 1999, “If I have a chance to invade, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it.” They knew he was intellectually weak, a dry alcoholic, re-born Christian deeply sympathetic to Israel. He didn’t ask many questions and was heavily influenced by their patron Dick Cheney. They knew Cheney was intent on encircling rising China, interested in securing control of Iraq’s oil fields and also impressed by their worldview and eager to work with them for mutual benefit.

Here was their opportunity to begin implementation of a program some of them (including Douglas Feith and his Defense Department subordinate as of 2001, David Wurmser) had laid out in 1996 in a paper commissioned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Netanyahu of course is now again prime minister, still opposing the “Oslo peace process” and facilitating more illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank.)

Termed “a kind of US-Israeli neoconservative manifesto” by one journalist, this paper, enitled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” called for the forceful removal of regimes hostile to Israel throughout the region (as opposed to a comprehensive peace agreement between Israel and the Arab world).

9-11 provided the neocons a grand opportunity to begin reconfiguring the Middle East for the benefit of Israel. But they couldn’t be straightforward about that; they couldn’t say that. They couldn’t say, “Saddam Hussein supports Palestinian militants and Hizbollah in Lebanon. So the U.S. should use its soldiers to topple him.” Hence the “noble lies” about weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda ties.

The neocons are influenced by the classicist/philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973). Wolfowitz studied under this immigrant German Jew at the University of Chicago. (Shulsky, another one of his students, once wrote a paper on the application of Leo Strauss’s thought to the world of intelligence.) Strauss distrusted modern democracy; having grown up in the Weimar Republic and fled it, after it had morphed into Nazi Germany as a result of elections. He questioned the ability of the masses to choose appropriate leadership. Drawing on some ideas of Plato he suggested that societies should be ruled in the background by “the wise” making use of front men (“gentlemen”) to persuade the ignorant masses to accept wise policies which, if explained to them honestly, they would likely reject. The gentleman articulates the “noble lies” on behalf of the wise and convinces the people.

(Recall how Dick Cheney told Tim Russet soon after 9-11 on Face the Nation: “We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies, if we’re going to be successful… so it’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.” Around the same time there were reports of the government planting false stories for strategic purposes not only in the foreign press but the U.S. press. Following protests, the administration announced it had no intention of planting stories in the U.S. press. But it was subsequently revealed that it paid reporters and worked with at least one planted “journalist” who attended White House press conferences.)

The “wise” in this case included Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff. He headed up an office so secretive that it refused to cooperate with the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office (which is supposed to ensure proper handling of intelligence documents by executive branch agencies). Cheney claimed–preposterously, but he got away with it–that the vice president’s office was not really an executive branch. Such arrogance was unprecedented.

Libby of course was convicted on charges related to an effort his discredit Joseph Wilson, in revenge for Wilson’s exposure of the administration’s deliberate use of the bogus Niger uranium story. There is no end to the dishonesty of these “wise” neocons responsible for the invasion of Iraq, which the world opposed and which UN Secretary General Kofi Annan flat-out called “illegal.”

How can it possibly have been “the right thing”?

The neocons got away with it, and then started slipping quietly out of the administration, laughing all the way to the bank. The World Bank, in Wolfowitz’s case (until he left his post in disgrace due to improper payments to his girlfriend). Feith left in 2005 to assume a distinguished post at Georgetown University. They are now college professors, cable television commentators with titles linking them to various right-wing thinktanks. They are treated with respect as authorities on world affairs. None are in jail for lying to the people of this country, producing a war that has displaced at least four million Iraqis, set back women’s rights, devastated the Iraqi Christian community…

And they’re not done! The current “noble lie” is that Iran is on the verge of producing nuclear weapons. Despite the fatwa issued by Iran’s supreme religious leader against nuclear weapons, despite the continual reports from the IAEA that no nuclear fuel has been diverted from monitored sites, despite the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran has no military nuclear program (which Cheney/Libby tried to suppress), the neocons insist that they know better.

In the build-up to the Iraq War, the neocons were careful to avoid mentioning the issue of Israel’s security, although that was their chief concern. Saddam, they said, was a threat to the whole world. The fact is, none of the countries bordering Iraq, including the two Iraq had invaded (Iran and Kuwait) saw Saddam as a threat or welcomed or requested a U.S. attack. Only Israel applauded U.S. war preparations.

But in building the case for an attack on the next target–Iran–the neocons center their argument around Israeli security. “Bomb Iran!” screams Norman Podhoretz, “godfather of neoconservatism.” Why? Because, he claims, it intends to use nuclear weapons against Israel as soon as it has them. How does he know this? Because, he insists, Iranian President Ahmadinejad has declared Iran’s intention to “wipe Israel off the map.”

This is another “noble lie.” (Ahmadinejad in a speech to students in solidarity with Palestine a few years ago merely quoted Ayatollah Khomeini–who died over twenty years ago: “This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time.” His point was that like the Soviet Union, or the regime of Saddam Hussein, Israel as a Jewish state won’t last forever.) But most people in this country have, I fear, been persuaded that Ahmadinejad said, “We’re going to wipe Israel off the map as soon as we get nukes.”

After a meeting with Podhoretz (also attended by Cheney), Bush gave a speech in which he ominously and ridiculously declared that Iran “threatens’ Israel with “a nuclear holocaust.” The association of genocide with a peaceful nuclear program once backed by the U.S. (when the Shah was in power) was naked fear mongering. And it was an appeal to the Christian Zionists to get on board the program to attack Iran–to save Israel in these End Times. (If the U.S. has to do something terrible to protect Israel, so be it.)

We all (should) know that Israel has nuclear weapons. Maybe 200 or so. And unlike Iran, it has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Its nuclear sites are not monitored by the IAEA. When rational people (including some Israelis) suggest that Iran even if it had nukes would not attack Israel with them for fear of massive retaliation, the neocons respond that Iran being so huge could survive a nuclear exchange whereas all the Jews in Israel could be killed. What nonsense. Their evidence? A statement by former Iranian president Rafsanjani: “If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in [its] possession … application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel, but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.”

That’s just a statement of fact, not a threat. The “Muslim world” extends from Morocco to Indonesia and includes about 1.3 billion people (while there are maybe 16 million Jews, about 6 million in Israel). And by the way the “world of Islam” already has nuclear weapons–Pakistan has had them for over a decade. Rafsanjani certainly didn’t say, “We’d be happy to loose 10 million of our people, if we can only kill 7 million Israelis, one quarter of whom are Muslim Arabs”! (Rafsanjani is, in fact, usually described as a “pragmatic conservative” who wants to avoid conflict with the west. He is certainly not advocating war with Israel. And by the way, whereas Israel has repeatedly invaded the surrounding countries since its inception, often claiming the actions are “pre-emptive” against those hostile to it, Iran has not invaded any country in centuries.)

The efforts to vilify Iran are endless. In 2006 Canada’s National Post ran a dis-informational piece, quickly picked up by the U.S. press, about a plan of the Iranian parliament to badge Jews. Iranian officials including Iranian Jewish leaders quickly pointed out that this was somebody’s fabrication. There had never been any such discussion, and it would be inconceivable in Iran. In fact Iran has the largest number of Jews in the Middle East outside Israel and they possess the same legal rights as others, and are guaranteed parliamentary representation. There is no doubt that Iran is a repressive state, and the situation of Jews is not ideal.

But it’s a whole lot more comfortable than that of Palestinians in Gaza. There was no movement underway to badge Jews. The author of the piece simply wanted to suggest that Iranian authorities were following Nazi precedent–total fear-mongering fiction.

Cheney (whom you recall has never retracted his insistence on Iraq-al-Qaeda links) has been saying that Iran can’t possibly need nuclear power for peaceful purposes because it has so much oil. But while Cheney served in the Nixon and Ford administrations the U.S. was actively encouraging Iran to acquire nuclear power through the “Atoms for Peace” program. Just like it was encouraging Brazil, Pakistan, India, and other countries to build reactors with the help of General Electric and other U.S. corporations.

As the Iranians point out, nuclear power is cleaner, their oil will eventually run out, and they’d rather sell it than use it domestically to finance development. (Cheney by the way sabotaged an Iranian effort towards rapprochement in the spring of 2003. In a message conveyed to Washington through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, the Iranians offered support for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, and for the Arab League proposal for a two-state solution. They offered to discuss their nuclear program and to end support for Hamas and Hizbollah. Powell as secretary of state was interested in the offer. But Cheney berated the Swiss diplomat for sending it in the first place, demanding he never do it again. “We don’t negotiate with evil,” he declared.

As of February 2003 Richard Armitage, Powell’s deputy, number two man in the State Department, was calling Iran a “democracy.” U.S. wrestlers had been attending the Takhti Cup in Iran, accorded a warm welcome. But if there was potential for “ping-pong diplomacy,” the neocons destroyed it.

The neocons have less of a presence in the Obama administration than they did in the Bush one, obviously. But Obama’s key advisor on Iran, with an office in the White House, is Dennis Ross, a neocon who has known to favor a policy of ultimatums to Iran followed by a naval blockade to prevent gasoline imports. In an op-ed piece he co-authored in 2008, he recommended the naval blockade be followed by a blockade of oil exports, then massive air strikes on the nuclear facilities and military facilities. The goal would be not only the crippling of the nuclear program for a few years but the destruction of the military and government.

What madness! The devastation and chaos this would produce are incalculable, worse even than the grotesque results of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The anti-U.S. rage that would explode throughout the world (and not only in Muslim countries) immeasurable. The neocons who once said the Iraq invasion would be a “cakewalk” and require 100,000 troops at most now say the Iranian people are the most “pro-American” in the region (and so they will welcome an American attack). The fact is, almost all Iranians are proud of the country’s nuclear program, want to move ahead with it, and would be shocked by any attack on it.

While 58% of U.S. residents polled now might say invading Iraq was the “right thing,” according to Fox News about 60% think force will need to be used to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons.

This means the neocons are winning. Obama’s in their camp, their black front man “gentleman” (rather like Colin Powell) delivering their message to the masses. (In his very first press conference after the election, Obama was asked about his response to a congratulatory message from Ahmadinejad. It was merely: “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon, I believe, is unacceptable.”) While he talks about talks without preconditions, he in fact demands that Iran suspend its entirely legal program of nuclear enrichment as the precondition for negotiations.

Neocon John Bolton was the main neocon in the State Department during George W. Bush administration. He peddled so much disinformation about Cuban and Syrian weapons programs that the intelligence community insisted he not appear at a scheduled Congressional hearing in July 2002. This is a man very comfortable with “noble lies,” delivering them with a particularly violent, blustering style. He tells Fox News he may run for president. Imagine that–the man couldn’t get Congressional confirmation as UN Ambassador because too many in both parties regarded him as a bully playing hard and loose with the facts–as president! The Republican field of candidates could then include a guy who thinks Jesus Christ appeared in the sky over New York delivering the Sermon on the Mount; a woman who claims to see Russia from her house and has no brain; a preacher who believes in “biblical inerrancy;” a general with lots of Iraqi and Afghan blood on his hands; and this attack dog.

With Democrats in disarray, Obama’s popularity plummeting, and historical memories short, one of them might win. Hey, if 58% think the war in Iraq was the “right thing,” anything’s possible in this troubled country.

In 2003 Bolton was (as Undersecretary of State) was assigned to attend multilateral talks with North Korean representatives concerning Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons. Because of his undiplomatic language about Kim Jong-il and life in North Korea, the North Koreans demanded he be excluded from the deliberations. In the same year British officials “at the highest level” demanded that he be removed from the team negotiating a (successful) deal with Libya in which Libya agreed to abandon WMDs.

The Koreans called him “human scum.” I don’t often agree with North Korean representations of reality, but I’d say anyone who deliberately lies in order to convince people to support a war (or fear a whole people, or hate a world religion) is indeed a scumbag.

Strauss was right, I think, in believing that the masses are ill-informed and can be easily manipulated. The 58% figure shows that. Teabaggers and East Coast liberals alike “support the troops.” While Obama praises Bush for his patriotic motives in his decision to invade Iraq, the supposedly antiwar satirist/comedian Steven Colbert is “honoring the troops” for their service.

Why not honor the Soviet youth who fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s too? Why not honor the wholesome German youth so filled with patriotism who invaded Poland in 1939? Or (applying Kant’s “categorical imperative”) honor all troops of all countries who have invaded countries throughout time, in appreciation of their “service”?

(I say this as a military brat born on an Air Force base in Alaska while my dad was monitoring Soviet behavior in the Bering Strait. I was raised on or near military bases in Nevada, California, Germany, Virginia and Hawai’i. My late father received the highest non-combat heroism award that the Air Force accords. Half of my family is military. But do I want to “honor the troops”? How can I do that without honoring what’s happened, what they did in Iraq?)

Strauss was right about the malleability of the masses. But the answer is not noble liars pulling strings. People need genuine empowerment, and need to be equipped with critical thinking abilities derived from education, and information from objective news media (rather than bombastic infotainment). How to bring about such empowerment? I don’t know.

58% now think the war was okay? It’s hard not to respond with despair. I just try to keep exposing the lies, and oppose the killing.

But the real wave of book burning started in the fourth century. Then, in the course of one person’s lifetime, Christianity was legalized (by the Edict of Milan in 312), its doctrine standardized by state order at the Council of Nicaea in 325, and under Theodosius I the faith was made virtually compulsory for Roman subjects ca. 390. (Jews were accorded a special exemption.) Believers in Jupiter and the other Greco-Roman gods had a brief reprieve under the rule of Emperor Julian (“the Apostate”) who reigned from 355 to 363. But then came the era of violent Christian intolerance. Temples to the pagan gods were shuttered, destroyed or converted to Christian churches. Manichaeism, the faith from Persia popular in some parts of the empire, was harshly suppressed, along with all pagan cults. Eventually Plato’s Academy in Athens was shut down–all in the name of the Christian God.

Scholars dispute the popular story that a Christian mob burned down the great Library in Alexandria, Egypt in 391. But after the Council of Nicaea, Christians publicly burned the works of Arius, a priest from Alexandria who maintained that Jesus was not God but rather a “creation” of God. (A famous ninth century Italian picture shows Emperor Constantine blessing the incineration.) You weren’t allowed to publish that opinion at that time.

In 364 the Christian emperor Jovian ordered the burning of the great library of Antioch, in the third largest city in the empire. It had been richly patronized by his predecessor Julian. Many if not most Christians–there were deep divisions among them–regarded the destruction of “heretical” or pagan material as eminently justified. (Why not burn what you know–via your religious faith–is false?)

Whenever you read that a text by Sophocles, or Aristophanes, or some other ancient author, or perhaps one of the many “gospels” composed by “heretical” Christians is “lost” (known only by title and some extracts in another test), think: Christian book burning. We know that there were many forms of early Christian belief because second and third century “heresiologists” like Irenaeus and Hippolytus summarized their views, selectively and tendentiously quoting texts in order to explain why they were ridiculous or wrong.

(Examples include the well-known Gospel of Thomas and the recently rediscovered Gospel of Judas.) They lived before the church was merged with the state. They were concerned with merely refuting and discrediting the texts they disliked, since they weren’t in a strong position to destroy them. But from the fourth century, as the bishops acquired political power, the offending texts were systematically torched.

There are innumerable medieval examples of Christian book burning; the philosopher Peter Abelard was forced by a synod council to burn his own book (offering a rationalistic explanation of the doctrine of the trinity) in 1121. In France the works of the heretical Cathars were burned in the thirteenth century, along with the works of the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and the Talmud. During the Reformation, works of opposing Christian movements burned one another’s’ books with glee, including Bibles translated into vernacular languages, without some church’s official permission.

Even during the Enlightenment the “Imperial Book Commission” of the Holy Roman Empire could order the burning of the writings of the German Deist, Johann Christian Edelmann. Frankfurt’s entire municipal government as well as a large crowd turned out to watch a thousand copies of his works set to the torch in 1750. (Edelmann had dared to declare that Jesus was a man, not a god.)

Thus if violence is, as H. Rap Brown once declared, “as American as cherry pie,” book burning is as Christian as the bread and wine of the Eucharist. There are modern Christians who uphold this long tradition. The Amazing Grace Baptist Church of Canton, North Carolina, planned a book burning on Halloween 2009. The pastor wanted to incinerate modern English translations of the Bible, since his church believes only the King James Version (of 1611) is God’s Word and all the other versions are “heretical.” The plan was stymied by torrential rain but the righteous ones did indeed trash the offending Bibles.

Those particular burners have the ”faith-based” conviction that somehow God in his wisdom called upon these translators in the early 17th century, with their limited knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, to render scripture definitively into English for all time. And that any subsequent translations must be the devil’s work. The inability of such people to understand that developments in such fields as archeology and linguistics are constantly producing better translations of texts never ceases to amaze me. What do they think are the “true” French, German, Spanish or Chinese versions of what they think is “God’s word”? Do they believe that the Creator of the universe first spoke through prophets in Hebrew and Greek, then decisively through the holy language of English, in a translation by 47 English linguists assembled by Hampton Court by the Anglican son of Mary Stuart, the Roman Catholic “Queen of Scots” as of 1611?

A hilarious parody of these believing types can be found here.

The (fictitious) “Landover Baptist Church” declares: “Unlike the sissy ‘Jesus is Love’ fake-Christians (whom both the Lord Jesus and we loathe) we have running around today, the early followers of Christ were never ashamed to burn books. In fact, if you ever find yourself being grateful for the destruction of most of the works of pagan nincompoops like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, you have a Christian to thank!”

It’s satire. But (just like Tina Fey’s parodies of Sarah Palin actually reflect Palin’s views) the satire reflects the genuine beliefs of some U.S. Christians. (Recall that Palin once tried to get the Wasilla City Librarian to remove certain books, but when called to account as a political candidate later told the press, ”Sweet Lord, no! I would never ask the librarian to burn books!”)

There are many fundamentalist Christians who fear to allow their children to attend public school precisely because they fear philosophical discussion, openness, dialectic, nuance, Socratic doubt. And many see college professors, in general, as nefarious if not demonic.

The widely publicized plans of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, to burn Qur’ans on Sept. 11 thus continues a long tradition of ignorance and intolerance. This intolerance is not normative in modern Christianity in the U.S.; ecumenism has long been the more mainstream tradition. But when you have someone of the stature of the Rev. Franklin Graham opining that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion,” does he not encourage the book burners?

It needs to be said: since the seventh century, the Islamic world has been generally more tolerant towards books than the Christian world. There have been some egregious departures from tolerance; the destruction of the library in the Nalanda (Buddhist) monastery in northern India by a Muslim army from Central Asia in the 12th century, for example. (Reports of the sacking of the Library of Alexandria by an Arab army in 642 are generally now discounted.)

But rather than burning the books of Jews and Christians, Muslims recognized these communities precisely because they were “Peoples of the Book” entitled to their texts! In South Asia they tended to also recognize Hindus and Buddhists as “Peoples of the Book” with their own sutras and sophisticated ideas derived from them. While Christians were burning books (to eradicate what they thought were evil influences and establish their own monopoly on thought), Muslims were preserving books and contemplating varied interpretations of reality. Muslims have never had a formulaic creed (like the Nicene creed) establishing doctrine, or a papacy to enforce belief. The Qur’an states “There should be no coercion in religion” (surah 2: 256). And while there are contradictory passages in the Qur’an (an historical text written by human beings over a certain amount of time) this message of tolerance has generally prevailed over the last thousand three hundred years.

The Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (r. 764-809), a contemporary of Charlemagne (whom he sent an elephant as a present) presided over a diverse court that included Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and probably Buddhists and Brahmins. Born in Tehran, Persia, he enjoyed presiding over debates between thinkers of different religions. (Charlemagne tolerated the Jews in his empire and began the “Carolingian Renaissance.” But he was probably less religiously tolerant than al-Rashid who sought his friendship.)

The first Abbasid caliphs founded the “House of Wisdom” library in Baghdad, which also served as a center for the translation of ancient Greek texts into Syriac or Arabic throughout the eighth and ninth centuries. Christians and Jews under Muslim rule played important roles in preserving these books. Some had been burned and lost in Christendom but were only re-introduced due to the fact that Muslims conquered the Iberian peninsula and established centers of intercultural dialogue in places like Cordoba. (Yes, that’s Cordoba, as in the New York City Islamic center, Cordoba House, that bigoted fools demanded change its name so as not to “offend” “Americans”…)

Everyone who’s received a decent primary education should realize it was interaction between Christians and Muslims in Muslim Spain that allowed for the revival of much classical learning lost to Christendom during the Dark Ages. It’s from Cordoba that we acquired algebra (which by the way, is a word derived from Arabic).

In some countries it’s against the law to deny the Holocaust (or its extent or nature). It’s considered a hate crime. What about burning a book which is the heart and soul of a community, denouncing it as the work of the devil? (Yes I know the Florida pastor plans to torch the Talmud too, just like his medieval forebears, making it plain to his flock and the world that he doesn’t just hate Muslims. But it seems an afterthought, a way of saying “I’m not just hostile to Muslims but to Jews too.”)

What about setting fuel and match to a text handled reverentially as a matter of course by a fifth of the world? Isn’t that even more provocative than challenging any historical record? Whether or not it’s a hate crime according to somebody’s legal definition, it’s a moral crime that Christians and all of us should deplore. Book burning’s part of an historical pattern, but Christians can question and renounce that heritage.

The world itself is burning. People are blowing themselves up in Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan. People are being fried by missile strikes on wedding parties in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Stinger and Griffin missiles burn bad . Everywhere the U.S. flag is getting torched precisely because of the crazy behavior and political influence of some U.S. Christians desperate to see the Apocalypse, after which they imagine the Beast and False Prophet will be thrown into a lake of fire (“to burn forever,” Rev 20:15). The latter (even those burning the Talmud) are eager to cheer on Zionist Jews including those with the most grotesque racist, Islamophobic inclinations, ‘I’m on God’s side,” they think, holding his His holy fire in their hands—stupid kids playing with fireworks.

After the rally in Kabul on Tuesday by Afghans denouncing not just the Florida church but Obama and the whole U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, Gen. Petraeus in urged the Rev. Terry Jones of Dove World Outreach to step back. The general knows he can’t change the people’s religion. He’s just charged with the task of bringing Afghanistan under the control of the U.S. military-industrial complex, and as a rational man sees a contradiction between the overall objectives of U.S. imperialism and the objectives of the Islamophobes in the U.S. fired up by cable news airheads. But the U.S. ruling elite–have despite all the talk about tolerance–deployed tools of bigotry from square one. (Think of Bush’s reference to a “Crusade” after 9-11.)

Malcolm X (a U.S. Muslim of significance) once said, “The chickens are coming home to roost.” After quoting that, right after 9-11, a very decent U.S. academic got ferociously attacked in a sort of book burning frenzy. But now even the top brass is alarmed at those chickens coming home to roost. It’s not like they really care about burning books in principle; they shred documents detailing their crimes, they attack WikiLeaks and demand it remove documents from the web.

But they suddenly care about anti-Muslim book burning “blowback” impeding their efforts in Southwest Asia. That blowback is their bad karma. And the inevitable decline of an immorally constituted empire is (in my humble opinion) fine. The main issue is the welfare of humanity. During the Spanish Inquisition, the Qur’an was burned in Spain. The German writer Heinrich Heine in his 1821 play Almanso, observed, “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen. (“Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.”)

If the crazies in Gainesville do their thing this Saturday they will burn more than books. They will perhaps draw down fire on all of us, contented that whatever happens is part of what they think is their god’s plan. Those among us, religious or irreligious, believers or atheists, with a sense of compassion for humanity and capacity for reason ought to protest such provocative actions.

There are plans for a rally this September 11 to defend the right of New York City Muslims to build a mosque or Islamic center—wherever they want, wherever is legal and approved by local authorities. On that day, as the idiots do their ugly thing in Florida, I hope there’s a good turnout in New York (especially of non-Muslims) to oppose bigotry.

2009: A Muslim organization having arranged to purchase an abandoned Burlington Coat factory on Park Place in Lower Manhattan plans to build a 13-story Islamic community center. It will feature a culinary school, conference hall, basketball court, swimming pool, and place of worship among other things and while principally servicing the Muslim community be open to all. It is to be called the Cordoba House, an apparent allusion to Muslim Spain in which Islam flourished alongside Christianity and Judaism from the eighth century up to the “Reconquest.”

In its mission statement the group says the center “will be dedicated to pluralism, service, arts and culture, education and empowerment, appreciation for our city and a deep respect for our planet. [It] will join New York to the world, offering a welcoming community center with multiple points of entry. With world-class facilities, a global scope and strong local roots, [the center] will offer a friendly and accessible platform for conversations across our identities.”

It will be four big city blocks away from where the World Trade Center once stood (“Ground Zero”). But since there are already about eight mosques in Manhattan, and a significant Muslim population in that highly diverse section of New York City, there is nothing remarkable about the group’s application to tear down the old factory building and construct the center.

The key organizer, Kuwait-born Feisal Abdul Rauf, is an imam of the Sufi school of Islam, generally described as “moderate” and mystical. He holds a degree in physics from Columbia University, had been hired by the FBI to conduct sensitivity training among their agents, and had worked with the U.S. State Department. He has met New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, who strongly supports the plan for the center.

In December 2009 the New York Times runs an article on the project. It is generally positive, citing two Jewish leaders and the mother of a 9-11 victim in support. In the same month conservative commentator Laura Ingraham, guest-hosting FOX News’ The O’Reilly Factor, interviews Rauf’s wife, Daisy Khan. The interview is as Salon’s Justin Elliot later notes “remarkable for its cordiality.” “I can’t find many people who really have a problem with [the project], declares Ingraham. “I like what you’re trying to do.”

On May 6, 2010, after a public hearing in which New Yorkers express strong feelings pro and con, the New York City community board committee unanimously votes to approve the project. Enter Pamela Geller, who maintains a blog called Atlas Shrugs. She has written a book about Barack Obama in which she alleges his real father was Malcolm X. She leads an apparently tiny wacko group called Stop the Islamization of America. Seeing the opportunity to have her moment in the sun (and she is soon interviewed by FOX News and CNN), she lashes out at Cordoba House. She declares on her blog, “this is not about religious liberty. No one has suggested abridging the First Amendment to stop the mosque, and to oppose the Ground Zero mosque is not to oppose the First Amendment. There are hundreds of mosques in New York, thousands in America. This is not a religious issue. This is an issue of national dignity and respect for those who were murdered at that site in the name of Islam.” She begins to organize a protest at the Park Place site.

Soon New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser references Geller’s group, falsely describing it as a “human rights group.” This brings the movement against the “Ground Zero mosque” out of the blogosphere and into the mainstream press. She sensationalizes the issue, falsely reporting that the center is to open on Sept. 11, 2011. A “controversy” erupts.

On July 16 Sarah Palin weighs in. Addressing not Muslims specifically but “Peaceful New Yorkers,” Sarah Palin twitters: “ pls refudiate [sic] the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real.” She adds two days later (after amending “refudiate” to “refute”), “Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts…” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich expresses outrage in multiple statements over the next month: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.” “It’s not about religion,” he insists, “and is clearly an aggressive act that is offensive.” He says the center will be a symbol of Muslim “triumphalism,” and that building the mosque near the site of the 9/11 attacks “would be like putting a Nazi sign next to the Holocaust Museum.”

He writes, “‘Cordoba House’ is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain–the capital of Muslim conquerors, who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex… every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest.” In response to this absurd allegation the center organizers change the name to “Park51.”

(Gingrich who postures as an historian and scholar might have noted the Visigothic church was purchased by the conquering emir after 718 and that the Arabs during their rule in Spain pursued a policy of far greater religious tolerance than the Christians had before them. They allowed churches and synagogues to operate freely. When the Christians regained power, they expelled all Jews and Muslims, or forced them to convert, and conducted the Spanish Inquisition.)

Republican politicians smelling blood and opportunity continue to lash out. Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty says, “I think it’s inappropriate… From a patriotic standpoint, it’s hallowed ground, it’s sacred ground, and we should respect that. We shouldn’t have images or activities that degrade or disrespect that in any way.” Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee asks on his FOX program August 4, “Even if the Muslims have the right to build it, don’t they do more to serve the public interest by exercising the responsible judgment to not build it?” “The fact that someone has the right to do something doesn’t necessarily make it the right thing to do,” echoed Ohio Rep. John Boehner.

Former Massachusetts Mitt Romney’s spokesman adds: “Governor Romney opposes the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero. The wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda compel rejection of this site.”

On August 13 President Obama hosts representatives of the Muslim community at the White House. “As a citizen,” he tells them, “and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances. This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable.”

A Republican running for Congress in Maryland, Andrew Harris, denounces the statement: “He is thinking like a lawyer and not an American, making declarations without America’s best interest in mind.” Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., also responds immediately: “President Obama is wrong. It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero.”

Bob Schieffer, CBS News’ chief Washington correspondent observes that Obama’s attention to the mosque issue “elevates it to a national issue. Clearly, Republicans are trying to take every advantage of this they can… every single Democratic candidate now running for office is going to be asked about it.”

Democratic Party leaders quickly distance themselves from the president’s remarks. “The First Amendment protects freedom of religion,” says a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid adding that the senator “respects that but thinks that the mosque should be built someplace else.”

Obama himself, startled by the response to his comments, has to elaborate almost immediately. “I was not commenting, and I will not comment,” he says, “on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding. That’s what our country is about.”

A CNN poll published in August 11 shows 68% of Americans opposed to the center, and a FOX poll published August 13 shows that 61% of U.S. residents support the legal right to construct Park 51 but 64% don’t want the Muslim group to construct it. This becomes the mandatory position of all politicians: they’ve got a right to do it, but they shouldn’t. It would not be politically wise to suggest a general ban on mosques or Islamic community centers. But everyone has to say, this particular project is wrong because it shows insensitivity to the feelings of “Americans” particularly family members of the 9-11 victims. Justin Quinn, who maintains the U.S. Conservative Politics Blog for example, justifies his disapproval by suggesting the building will hurt “thousands of people who continue to mourn the loss of loved ones who were turned to dust in the attacks.”

But there is another issue as well. New York gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio, Gingrich, and Quinn all call for an investigation of the center’s funding, suggesting that some of it might come from “Islamic terrorists.” Lazio speaks ominously about the “the questionable backers of the Cordoba Mosque at Ground Zero” and calls for a public investigation. Quinn says, “let’s at least find out where the money is coming from to pay for this thing.” Soon House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is on board the program, although, alarmed at the backlash from Obama’s remarks, she suggests the “anti-mosque” movement should also be investigated.

By innuendo they assert that Rauf is linked to international terrorism. That seems unlikely since he’s been hired by the FBI since 2001 to offer sensitivity training to agents and has also just been asked by the State Department recently to tour the Middle East to “foster greater understanding” about the U.S. and its Muslims. The charge seems based solely on the fact that in a June 2010 interview with Aaron Klein of New York’s WABC Radio, he declined to say whether he agreed with the listing of Hamas as a “terrorist organization.”

He’d simply replied: “I’m not a politician. I try to avoid the issues. The issue of terrorism is a very complex question…. I’m a bridge builder. I define my work as a bridge builder. I do not want to be placed, nor do I accept to be placed in a position of being put in a position where I am the target of one side or another.”

(I see nothing damning here. Hamas, initially promoted by Israel as an alternative to secular Palestinian nationalism, has resisted Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. It maintained long-term ceasefires with Israel ended due to Israeli action. It won a fair election in 2006. The U.S. State Department has considered it a “terrorist organization” since at least 1994 but the European Union only added it to its blacklist in 2003 under U.S. pressure. Many people including former President Jimmy Carter have asked that it be removed from that list, which is highly political and arbitrary and under no meaningful Congressional oversight. A U.S. Appeals Court recently ruled that the State Department must review its decision to list the People’s Mujahadeen Organization of Iran as “terrorist.” These things are very political, and no one should demand that Rauf endorse the listing. Certainly not those opposed to “Big Government” and its expectations of passive obedience from the citizenry.)

There are also wild accusations (aside from Gingrich’s cited above) that the center is designed to rub 9-11 in our noses. “The mosque at Ground Zero,” Quinn insists, “is being pursued to prove a simple political point — that Islamic fundamentalists can knock our buildings down, murder our citizens and then use our own laws against us so they can laugh in our faces.”

There are also hateful, provocative comments. Tea Party Express leader and “radio personality” Mark Williams blogs his followers: “The monument would consist of a Mosque for the worship of the terrorists’ monkey-god (repeat: ‘the terrorists’ monkey-god.” if you feel that fits a description of Allah then that is your own deep-seated emotional baggage not mine, talk to the terrorists who use Allah as their excuse and the Muslims who apologize for and rationalize them) and a ‘cultural center’ to propagandize for the extermination of all things not approved by their cult. It is a project of American Society for Muslim Advancement and the Cordoba Initiative, essentially the same group of apologists (but under 2 different names) for terrorists and the animals who use it as a terrorist ideology. They cloak their evil with new age gibberish that suggests Islam is just misunderstood.”

Even though this fascist has been expelled from the “mainstream” National Tea Party Federation for his racist comments about the NAACP, he and they speak for a significant number in spewing out their anti-Muslim vitriol. Hasn’t the widely loved Billy Graham’s son Franklin called Islam the “religion of the Devil?”

Thus by mid-August a modest project by a mainstream U.S. Muslim group backed by the New York City mayor and unanimously approved by the New York City community committee has been transformed into a general attack on Muslim rights in this country. The scary thing is that disapproval is so widespread, bipartisan, and driven by irrational fear if not hatred.

What does this tell us about this country? It tells us that nine years after 9-11 (and nice centuries after the First Crusade), Islamophobia is rampant and politically useful. Even though U.S. troops are supposedly fighting to help Muslims in two countries and both Bush and Obama have officially (for whatever reasons) emphasized that the U.S. is not against Islam, Islam is a religion of peace, we value our Muslim citizens, etc. the “us vs. them” mentality remains strong.

The prevalent argument against the center–that it may hurt people’s feelings–is an argument that people should be hurt by the mere existence of an Islamic site near “Ground Zero.” That they should feel hurt at the site of a Muslim establishment as they walk around Lower Manhattan, associating it with the 9-11 hijackers. That they should conflate Mohamed Atta and Rauf, or that at least if they do, their feelings should be respected. Of course Rauf’s hope is to counter precisely such feels by encouraging understanding and dialogue.

The fact in any case is that according to an August 10 Marist poll only 31% of Manhattan residents oppose the center! And only a slim majority of New York City residents find fault with it—that due no doubt to this faux “controversy”!

What about the feelings of U.S. Muslims, including those who had family members perish in the 9-11 bombing? They read about the plans of the “Dove World Outreach Center” in Gainesville, Florida—a “New Testament church, based on the Bible”—to promote an “International Burn a Quran Day” this September 11. They read about anti-mosque campaigns in Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Temecula, California; Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The Tea Party movement and mainstream politicians enthusiastically embrace the anti-mosque lynchmob.

I imagine there are some hurt feelings among people unfairly associated with terrorism just because a handful of Saudis attacked the U.S. nine years ago. To be told “this sacred ground–our American ground” so we don’t want your Muslim center here “degrading” and “disrespecting” it (Pawlenty’s terms) is to be told you’re not really a full citizen and your religion (as opposed to, say, Catholicism) isn’t an American one. It must be insulting and frustrating at least.

The notion that “they attacked us”–that the whole Muslim world attacked “us”–is so preposterous that only the simplest minds can believe it and the most devious exploit their ignorance for political gain. The U.S. has attacked Muslim countries, or intervened to impose regime change, repeatedly in the post-war period. Since 1967 it has provided nearly unconditional support to Israel, inevitably endorsing or accepting its grotesque mistreatment of the Palestinians. It cruelly maintained sanctions against Iraq throughout the 1990s, resulting in at least half a million children’s deaths. It provides massive aid to hated dictators like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak.

U.S. forces have killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in its latest attack on Iraq, based entirely on lies that only resonated among the people because they were shell-shocked by 9-11 and willing to believe a secularist like Saddam was deeply involved. It maintains an increasingly unpopular occupation of Afghanistan and by its drone attacks on Pakistan has thoroughly alienated the Pakistani people. It is natural for Muslims globally to see themselves under U.S. attack. That a few have responded with terrorist attacks is unsurprising; the CIA calls it “blowback.” It is also natural for most, like Rauf, to want to respond to all this defensively with peaceful education and dialogue.

The problem isn’t limited to the U.S. Other western countries are also manifesting Islamophobia, placing Muslims on the defensive. In March 2005 the French parliament voted to ban Islamic head scarves in public schools. This has forced French Muslim schoolgirls to choose between following rules set down in the Qur’an and receiving public education. In 2005 the Danish right-wing newspaper Morgenavisen Jyllands-Posten “invited members of the Danish editorial cartoonists union to draw Muhammad as they see him.” Since Muslim teaching forbids depiction of the prophet, and since it was assumed many cartoons would depict him a terrorist, this was a deliberate provocation. In December 2009 Swiss voters voted in a referendum to ban further construction of minarets in the country. (There are only four.)

There are a lot of hurt feelings about violent attacks, and Muslims in Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere frankly have more cause for them than the people of New York City. The loss of 2976 people in New York on 9-11 was tragic. But more than that number of civilians were killed by U.S. bombing between October 2001 and March 2002, and the ongoing bombing has caused Afghans initially willing to cooperate with US/NATO to explode in indignation. Members of Parliament walk out, the streets of Kabul fill with anti-U.S. demonstrators, not because they’re Muslim, but because their sense of outrage that most non-Muslims in the world share, is provoked by arrogant imperialism.

The loss of life in Iraq, the displacement of millions, the massive increase in children born with deformities or suffering from leukemia due to US use of depleted uranium and agent orange, has been catastrophic. And aside from hurt feelings resulting from these wars, there are lots of hurt feelings over discrimination, experienced throughout the western world.

The controversy over the Islamic center and the results of the opinion polls suggest that neither the politicians nor pundits nor people in general understand any of this, and so seem hell-bent on generating more Muslim resentment. Nothing good can come out of that. But good could come out of Park51. Non-believer that I am, I hope the imam and his group stand strong and refuse to be intimidated by demagogues and fools.

If  true, it is a tale of honesty and dishonesty, opportunism, and cowardice. It indicates that Gen. David Petraeus, who just replaced Gen. McChrystal as commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, has frankly assessed that the intimate U.S. relationship with Israel is costing U.S. lives in the Middle East. But he’s concerned that his views may cost him politically and so uses buddies in the media to conceal them.

Since the story’s a bit complicated I thought I’d arrange the material in a straightforward chronology.

Dec. 2009: on orders from Gen. Petraeus, then Commander of U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), a team of military officers tours the Middle East, interviewing senior Arab leaders who tell them that U.S. inability to force Israel to end settlements is making the U.S. look weak and also spreading anti-American feeling throughout the region.

Jan. 16, 2010: this team is sent by Petraeus to the Pentagon to brief Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The 45-minute 33 slide PowerPoint briefing stuns Mullen with its message that U.S. failure to constrain Israel is damaging U.S. interests throughout Southwest Asia.

Jan. 18: Petraeus sends a paper to Mullen (or according to another report, the White House) requesting that the West Bank and Gaza (which now, with Israel, falls under the European Command [EUCOM]), be included within CENTCOM. He argues that this would indicate to Arab leaders that the U.S. understood that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the central one in the region. (An unnamed Pentagon official has confirmed that this proposal was “dead on arrival”).

March: White House sends special envoy for the Middle East, George Mitchell, on a visit to Arab capitals and Israel to encourage Israeli-Palestinian talks. He is in Israel March 9.

March 9: Mullen visits Israel to meet with Israeli Chief of General Staff, Lt. General Gabi Ashkenazi. He tells him that Israel has to see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “in a larger, regional, context” as having a direct impact on America’s status in the region. (That is to say: continued defiance of Obama’s call for a freeze on settlement on the West Bank is directly hurting U.S. interests throughout the Arab world.)

March 9: On the very same day, Vice President Joe Biden is also in Israel. He’s embarrassed by an Israeli announcement that the Netanyahu government will be building 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem in defiance of Obama’s urging that there be a freeze to allow for Israeli-Palestinian talks. Biden has a private, angry exchange with the Israeli Prime Minister, telling him: “This is starting to get dangerous for us. What you’re doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. That endangers us, and it endangers regional peace.”

March 11: Israeli journalist, Shimon Shiffer, publishes article entitled “Biden: You’re Jeopardizing Regional Peace” in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. He reports: “The vice president told his Israeli hosts that since many people in the Muslim world perceived a connection between Israel’s actions and US policy, any decision about construction that undermines Palestinian rights in East Jerusalem could have an impact on the personal safety of American troops fighting against Islamic terrorism.”

March 13: Mark Perry, a military and intelligence analyst on the Middle East for 20 years, posts an article on the Foreign Policy blog entitled “The Petraeus briefing: Biden’s embarrassment is not the whole story” revealing Petraeus’ actions and noting the “January Mullen briefing was unprecedented. No previous CENTCOM commander had ever expressed himself on what is essentially a political issue; which is why the briefers were careful to tell Mullen that their conclusions followed from a December 2009 tour of the region where, on Petraeus’s instructions, they spoke to senior Arab leaders.”

March 16: neocon, Max Boot, member of the Council of Foreign Relations, tries to refute Perry’s piece on the blog of Commentary magazine (a monthly on politics and Judaism and considered a leading voice of neoconservatism), stating “I asked a military officer who is familiar with the briefing in question and with Petraeus’s thinking on the issue to clarify matters. He told me that Perry’s item was ‘incorrect.’” He quotes the unnamed officer [whom Perry believes is Petreus, for reasons which will become clear] as stating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is only “one of many issues, among which also is the unwillingness to recognize Israel and the unwillingness to confront the extremists who threaten Israelis.” Boot adds: “That’s about what I expected: Petraeus holds a much more realistic and nuanced view than the one attributed to him by terrorist groupie Mark Perry.” (This is an allusion to the fact that Perry has interviewed members of Hezbollah and Hamas, and written a book entitled Talking to Terrorists.)

March 16: Petraeus in written testimony tells Congress: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests. . . Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the [region] and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. . .”

March 16: On her Facebook page, Sarah Palin calls concerns about Israeli settlements “this manufactured Israeli controversy.” She writes “the Obama Administration has decided to escalate, make unilateral demands of Israel, and threaten the very foundation of the US-Israel relationship. This is quickly leading to the worst crisis in US-Israel relations in decades, and yet this did not have to happen. More importantly, it needs to stop before it spirals out of control.”  

March 18: M. J. Rosenberg writes a piece entitled “On The Middle East: It’s Palin vs. Petraeus & New Poll” posted on the Political Correction blog of the Media Matters Action Network in which he praises Petraeus’s views on Israel/Palestine. He notes that Petraeus is spoken of as a Republican candidate for President and contrasts his views with those of Palin.

March 18, 2:18: Michael Gfoeller, a State Department Policy Advisor serving CENTCOM, forwards Rosenberg’s story to Petraeus with the subject line: “FW: On the Middle East: It’s Palin vs Petraeus.” His message is short: “Sir: FYI. Mike.”

2:27: Petraeus forwards the story to Commentary’s Boot, stating: “As you know, I didn’t say that.  It’s in a written submission for the record…” He means that the above-quoted Congressional testimony wasn’t in his oral remarks but in the 56-page document plainly entitled “Statement of General David H. Petraeus, U.S. Army Commander, US Central Command before the Senate Armed Services Committee on the posture of US Central Command, 16 Mar 2010.”  

2:31: Boot responds to Petraeus: “Oh brother. Luckily it’s only media matters [the Media Matters Network] which has no credibility but think I will do another short item pointing people to what you actually said as opposed to what’s in the posture statement.”

2:37: Petraeus responds to Boot: “Thx, Max.  (Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?!  And that I will be the speaker at the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps in mid-Apr at the Capitol Dome…)”

2:45: Boot to Petraeus: “No don’t think that’s relevant because you’re not being accused of being anti-Semitic.”

2:57: Petraeus: “Roger! :-)”

3:11: Boot files a story on the Commentary blog, “A Lie: David Petraeus, Anti-Israel.” He attacks “misleading commentary that continues to emerge, attributing anti-Israeli sentiment to Gen. David Petraeus.” He dismisses the “posture statement” as a filing from “Petraeus’s staff.” Concludes: “General Petraeus obviously doesn’t see the Israeli-Arab ‘peace process’ as a top issue for his command, because he didn’t even raise it in his opening statement. When he was pressed on it, he made a fairly anodyne [pain-soothing] statement about the need to encourage negotiations to help moderate Arab regimes. That’s it. He didn’t say that all settlements had to be stopped or that Israel is to blame for the lack of progress in negotiations. And he definitely didn’t say that the administration should engineer a crisis in Israeli-U.S. relations in order to end the construction of new housing for Jews in East Jerusalem.”

March 19: Activist James Morris, who runs the website “Neocon Zionist Threat to America” and sends out endless emails with detailed links to media and officials, sends Petraeus an email congratulating him on his statement to Congress. Petraeus merely responds by forwarding the Commentary piece by Boot and the message: “FYI.” The general doesn’t realize it, but underneath the Commentary piece is the entire exchange with Boot quoted above. That’s why we know about it.

March 20: Morris emails Petraeus trying to engage him further on the issue. Petraeus replies: “Thanks, James. Frankly, I’d like to let all this die down at this point, if that’s possible! All best —”

May: Morris shares the emails with Philip Weiss of the Mondoweiss (War of Ideas in the Middle East) blog.  (This is affiliated with The Nation magazine). Weiss overlooks it at the time.

Late June: after McChrystal is fired and replaced by Petraeus, Morris sends Weiss an email with subject line: “Did you read my exchange with Petraeus” and Weiss finally reads it

July 2: Weiss posts his article. Now, what — if the story’s true –does all this tell us? It seems to me it indicates the following:

(1) Petraeus genuinely believes that Israeli actions threaten what he sees as U.S. interests in the region, and endanger U.S. troops;

(2) he doesn’t want to say this too loudly or want the voting public to think about this;

(3) he wants to run for president, and to position himself against Palin;

(4) there are people in the State Department (like Gfoeller) who’d like to help him do that;

(5) he’s deeply concerned about the Jewish vote (Does it help if folks know that I hosted Elie Wiesel and his wife at our quarters last Sun night?! );

(6) he has a close relationship with Boot, whom you notice, doesn’t bother to call him “Sir;” and

(7) he’s indiscreet in handling his email correspondence.

The people fighting the 94,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan are mainly Pashtun nationalists energized by jihadist Islam. They’re not much interested in Israel-Palestine which is very far away but when they hear about the plight of the Palestinians it probably increases their anger at the invaders. In that sense, the close U.S.-Israeli partnership may indeed threaten their lives. Maybe the troops ought to know that a general who believes that (but doesn’t want to say so out loud) is now leading them.

Oh, and could some journalist ask about this at the next Defense Department news briefing?

A little background on Petraeus’s friend, Max, can be obtained on Wikipedia.

Highlights

“Boot supports what he calls American imperialism based on nation building and the pursuit of spreading democracy across the non-Western world. He sees this as the only way to prevent another event like the 9/11 attacks. He has written, “[u]nlike 19th-century European colonialists, we would not aim to impose our rule permanently. Instead… occupation would be a temporary expedient to allow the people to get back on their feet.”

“Boot wrote Savage Wars of Peace, a study of small wars in American history, with Basic Books in 2002. The title came from Kipling’s poem ‘White Man’s Burden.’ James A. Russell in Journal of Cold War Studies criticized the book, saying that “Boot did none of the critical research, and thus the inferences he draws from his uncritical rendition of history are essentially meaningless.”

“Boot vigorously supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2007 surge. During the Gaza war, Boot stated that Israel was morally justified to invade the Gaza Strip.”

“John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s controversial 2007 book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy named Boot as a neo-conservative ‘pundit’ that represented the Israeli lobby’s positions, notably within the Council of Foreign Relations. The authors argued that Boot and other figures dishonestly warp American foreign policy away from its national interest.”

But read the whole thing.

This is an allusion to Eikenberry’s leaked November 2009 cables to Washington as Obama mulled over McChrystal’s request for an additional 40-50,000 troops in Afghanistan. (Obama had already provided McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. McKiernan, 17,000 more earlier that year.) In one of them he declared that Afghan President Karzai was “not an adequate strategic partner” and that “[s]ending additional forces will delay the day when Afghans will take over, and make it difficult, if not impossible, to bring our people home on a reasonable timetable.” In other words, he was all but predicting mission failure.

The month before, in a Q&A session after a speech in London, McChrystal had been asked if he would support the policy of scaling back forces in Afghanistan favored by Biden. By military rules he ought to have said, “I’ll obey the orders of my Commander-in-Chief.” But he answered, “The short answer is: No. Waiting does not prolong a favorable outcome. This effort will not remain winnable indefinitely, and nor will public support.” Given this public difference with the vice president, the general was courting an executive rebuke. He was immediately called to task by Obama on the tarmac in Copenhagen, where the president was pushing Chicago’s unsuccessful bid to host the Olympics.

The press described the 25-minute meeting as “tense” but the rebuke was apparently gentle. Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, merely observed, “It is imperative that all of us taking part in these deliberations, civilians and military alike, provide our best advice to the president, candidly but privately.” National Security Advisor, Gen. Jim Jones, told CNN, as though speaking of a hypothetical situation, “Ideally, it’s better for military advice to come up through the chain of command.”

Of course, now we have a sense of the depth of McChrystal’s contempt for the civilian leadership; he felt Obama was “disengaged” from the war and “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the military. He ridiculed Biden in a conversation with an aide in Hastings’ presence. He was saying, in effect, both in the London talk and in the interview that these fools should just leave the policy up to us.

Well, maybe Obama is intimidated by the brass. In December he caved in to McChrystal’s request by giving him 30,000 more soldiers. (Or perhaps he thought he was–once again–taking a “middle” and conciliatory position by not giving him all he wanted.)

But what of McChrystal’s comment on Eikenberry, a fellow (former) general, and his concern about “covering his flank for the history books” by opposing, with Biden, the troop increase?

For some reason I’m reminded of how George W. Bush replied to Bob Woodward’s question about how history would judge the Iraq War. “History?,” he replied, “We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” I’m also reminded of an unnamed neocon’s disdainful comment to New York Times journalist, Ron Suskind, in 2002 about people in the “reality-based community” that “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” And “how that’s not the way the world works anymore. We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality… We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do.”

There’s the same kind of contempt for reality and historical repercussions in McChrystal’s comment about Eikenberry: where does Eikenberry get off judiciously studying reality when the Empire requires powerful delusions? And then shooting his mouth off about his realistic observations?

Perhaps McChrystal at some mental level realizes that the war is going to fail, like the U.S. effort in South Vietnam. In his London talk he noted, “The situation is serious, and I choose that word very carefully.  I would add that neither success nor failure for our endeavor in support of the Afghan people and government can be taken for granted.  My assessment and my best military judgment is that the situation is, in some ways, deteriorating, but not in all ways.”

Maybe he’s contrasting Eikenberry’s wimpy empiricism with his own macho defiance of actuality. Maybe he subconsciously wanted to fail gloriously, sending 100 ISAF troops per month to their deaths in a hopeless cause while establishing a legacy like Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who failed to conquer North Korea at the cost of tens of thousands of U.S. troops, or Gen. William Westmoreland, who to prevent the reunification of Vietnam, sent tens of thousands more to their deaths. (Some think these men were heroes.)

Maybe in the interval between that London speech and the Rolling Stone interview McChrystal changed his mind. Rather than prosecute the impossible war himself, he would leave the scene. One might detect a sort of career death-wish here. (In psychiatry a death-wish is “a desire for self-destruction, often accompanied by feelings of depression, hopelessness, and self-reproach.”) Every military officer knows that Art. 88 of the UCMJ states: “Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.” But maybe he also had Obama pegged as someone unlikely to have him court-martialed and deny him his pension but merely likely to ask for his resignation, which is what happened.

There’s another, not necessarily contradictory, factor: all those Budweisers (“Lite” though they were) consumed during the interviews. McChrystal has a history of drinking. According to the Rolling Stone article, “He accumulated [at West Point] more than 100 hours of demerits for drinking, partying and insubordination — a record that his classmates boasted made him a ‘century man.’ One classmate, who asked not to be named, recalls finding McChrystal passed out in the shower after downing a case of beer he had hidden under the sink. The troublemaking almost got him kicked out…” This might explain the total lack of discretion; as the Greek proverb says, “Wine and children speak the truth.” How to fathom why McChrystal and his aides would talk so glibly to, of all people, a journalist of Rolling Stone which has produced so many trenchant criticisms of both the Iraq and Afghan Wars?

In any case, as a number of people have observed, McChrystal may have done Obama a big favor by his insubordination. Obama became president largely because of his opposition to the Iraq War. He has never been thoroughly opposed, describing it as a “strategic blunder,” rather than a war based on lies (whose authors he won’t prosecute), a “war of choice” rather than a clear violation of international law. He has never complained about the hundreds of thousands dead. But the antiwar movement saw him as a dove when compared to the hawkish Hillary Clinton, who as New York state senator, voted to support Bush’s war.

Ever seeking a middle position, as if to counter any far-right supposition that he’s a pacifist or socialist, Obama felt he had to endorse the Afghan War as one of “necessity” following the 9-11 attacks. (He surely knows that those attacks involved only a couple of Arabs who’d actually trained in Afghanistan and that the Taliban had little to do with them. He knows that al-Qaeda has long since been driven out of the country. But he had to embrace one of the wars and to argue that Bush had “dropped the ball” in going to war in Iraq while ISAF forces were getting bogged down in Afghanistan.) Given his position, the brass thought they could, to use McChrystal’s word, “intimidate” him into escalation. And they did, overruling Biden.

(By the way, notice how Biden’s no Dick Cheney. And however politically pro-Israel he may be, his OVP isn’t a nest—as Cheney’s was—of amoral ideologues hell-bent on using lies to service Israel’s objectives. Recall how the former vice president accompanied by his aide “Scooter” Libby repeatedly marched to the Pentagon to demand war on Iraq, and how he got his way forcing the intelligence community to disseminate total lies to justify the Iraq invasion? Biden’s not going to march on the Pentagon demanding to get his way. In any case, he’ll defer to Obama’s judgment, whereas Cheney shaped Bush’s judgment, at least during his first term.)

Obama has now fired two Commanders of the ISAF forces while giving the military almost 50,000 more troops, bringing the force to about the size of the Soviet forces in the 1980s—who were defeated and driven out by Taliban-types. The new Commander, Gen. David Petraeus, and his boss are both ostensibly committed to the present “COIN” strategy although one of its prime features–relative restraint in the sort of bombing that kills civilians and infuriates Afghan public opinion–may be under review. Reports emphasize how the U.S. troops think more bombing will make them less vulnerable. (If you just kill everyone in the neighborhood, you, as the foreign presence, will be more secure.)

We’ll have to see what comes of that. Common sense suggests that more bombing will produce more resistance to the occupation, more anger at Karzai and what Eikenberry calls a “political ruling class that [does not provide] an overarching national identity that transcends local affiliations and provides reliable partnership.” Meanwhile the mercurial (and according to some reports sometimes opiated) Karzai wants U.S. support given his tiny political base but also wants to widen that base by criticizing ISAF, calling for a withdrawal date, and on one occasion (April 2010) threatening to join the Taliban. (Rejoin, I should say. Few know that he was briefly the Taliban regime’s first foreign minister in 1996.)

McChrystal’s insubordination might ultimately profit Obama by allowing him to step back from his pro-war position which is now rejected by the majority of U.S. citizens. (A June 2010 ABC News-Washington Post poll shows 53% say the war isn’t worth fighting.) He could opt a version of Biden’s model of “Chaos-stan” in which the people of the country are left to resolve their own issues, while the U.S. strives to ensure that al-Qaeda does not return. Al-Qaeda is in Pakistan and Yemen now, from which plots can be hatched as easily as in Afghanistan (or Germany, or the U.S.). It does not need its former redoubt. And Obama does not need the Afghan war to boost his popularity.

Obama, in his very first press conference following the election, was asked his response to Iranian leader Ahmadinejad’s congratulatory letter. He replied, changing the subject: “Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon, I believe, is unacceptable. And we have to mount an international effort to prevent that from happening.” It was a clear signal to the outgoing administration and its neocon masters of the Big Lie that he would persevere in their crusade to topple the Tehran government, using the convenient ploy of nuclear fear-mongering.

“Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon…is unacceptable.” That assumes that Iran is trying to get one. This rootless assumption was relentlessly promoted by the disinformation specialists nested in the Office of the Vice President throughout the Bush administration. The same ones who insisted that al-Qaeda had an intimate relationship with Saddam Hussein, that Iraq was procuring uranium from Niger, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, etc. (Outrageous lies Obama has never wanted to investigate, urging us all to just “move on” and thus forgive the prevaricators and ignore all the blood on their hands.)

Bush’s State Department had initially responded positively to Iranian overtures for rapprochement, including the remarkable 2003 offer most Americans have probably never heard about. That initiative, conveyed to the U.S. through the Swiss ambassador to the country, entailed talks designed to reopen diplomatic and trade ties, commit Iran to a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine, end Iranian support for Hamas and Hizbollah, and alleviate U.S. concerns about Iran’s nuclear program. Flynt Leverett, then a senior director on the National Security Council staff , has called it “a serious effort, a respectable effort to lay out a comprehensive agenda for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement.” Secretary of State Colin Powell was receptive.

But Vice President Dick Cheney, countermanding Powell — whom he had used in 2002 to deliver the false testimony about Iraq to the UN — rejected it out of hand. He even berated the Swiss ambassador and warned him from ever again troubling the U.S. with such a bothersome communication. (Isn’t it odd, by the way, that during the Bush/Cheney years the Office of the Vice President, traditionally a rather ceremonial institution, acquired such power while maintaining such secrecy, defiantly refusing to divulge to appropriate authorities even the number of confidential documents in its bloated files?)

Cheney made it U.S. policy to insist that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. Chief talking point, crafted by Cheney’s super-secretive office: Iran has so much oil, thus no need for nuclear energy. The purpose for the program can only be military.

Cheney banked (successfully) on people’s ignorance of history. But the flaw of this line of reasoning has been well-exposed to any with eyes to see and ears to hear. The peaceful nuclear program was begun under the Shah when he was a reliable tool of the U.S. It was initiated under the U.S.’s “Atoms for Peace” program in the 1950s and encouraged by successive U.S. administrations into the 1970s. U.S. corporations such as General Electric were intimately involved in its development. The nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for treating cancer patients, at the center of the recent Brazil-Turkey-Iran uranium enrichment deal, was built by the U.S.

When the Shah was in power, there was no talk of Iran’s nuclear program having the sole and obvious purpose of producing nuclear weapons. Iran was and is a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. It sought, as it now seeks, with Russian support, nuclear energy for electric power generation. Its supply of oil will likely run out within decades, and in any case, Iran seeks to sell its oil to generate capital for national development.

The charge has nothing to do with empirical reality. The entire U.S. intelligence community, 16 agencies including the CIA and military intelligence agencies, issued a “National Intelligence Estimate” in late 2007 (delayed a year due to Cheney’s obstruction) concluding “with high confidence” that “in fall 2003, Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program.” (The Russian foreign minister questioned whether there had ever been such a program, noting that Russian intelligence hadn’t concluded such. Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter also expressed doubts. It’s quite possible that the positing of a historical nuclear weapons program was inserted at Cheney’s insistance to validate in some measure his wild accusations.) Top intelligence officials continue to endorse this assessment, although under enormous pressure to “fix the facts around policy.” (That, by the way, is how British intelligence characterized the U.S. propaganda campaign against Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion.)

This isn’t about the rational assessment of reality but about fear-mongering, Goebbels style ( “…the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism…”) And it’s worked. A CNN poll in Febuary 2010 found that 71% of U.S. residents believe that Iran already has nuclear weapons. The professionals, the IAEA, say repeatedly there’s no evidence even for a military program. But the “Bomb Iran” faction in the U.S. ruling elite, cynically aware of how gullible people can be, has persuaded most of the American people that there’s not just a program but actual nukes!

A quarter of this malleable mass would back military action now, and “if economic and diplomatic efforts fail” (meaning: if Obama and the New York Times can convince them the U.S. has gone that last mile to defuse an unproven threat) 57% would support a U.S. attack. These figures should sicken anyone reading this. (On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll found that 54% supported an invasion without UN authorization. Most had been brainwashed into thinking Iraq was somehow connected to 9-11.)

These bellicose people are not stupid, of course, merely misinformed and misled, victims of a culture of cowboy violence, The mainstream press has not emphasized the fact that the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has never found an iota of evidence for a military program. Instead it has embraced a program of demonization. Any new item of disinformation funnelled it by those hell-bent on vilifying Iran, from the preposterous allegation that the Iranian parliament was considering a bill to badge Jews, to the charge that Iran is backing the Taliban in Afghanistan, to the claim that Iran is harboring al-Qaeda, receives respectful treatment. Thus the barrage of accusations — even those immediately discredited — produce the desired effect on an impressional public. And the media has been deeply complicit in efforts to blur any distinction between Iran’s Shiite republicanism and radical Sunni dreams of a global emirate.

With Congress it is a somewhat different matter. The legislators aren’t so much producing lies as amicably humoring and abetting the liars. This means maintaining a comfortable distance from researched reality. In the fall of 2006 Jeff Stein of the Congressional Quarterly interviewed key legislators and intelligence officials involved with foreign policy, asking them if they knew the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni. His premise was that to develop a reasoned opinion about U.S. policy in Southwest Asia one had to know some basic facts about the region. Religious differences make certain alignments all but unthinkable. Iran almost went to war with the ferociously anti-Shiite Taliban in 1999. Al-Qaeda does not recognize Shiites as real Muslims and despises the Tehran regime with a passion.

The response of Representative Terry Everett, seven-term Alabama Republican, then vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence, was typical. “One’s in one location, another’s in another location,” he told Stein, chuckling. “No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.” Representative Jo Ann Davis, a Virginia Republican heading a House intelligence subcommittee, ventured, “It’s a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it’s the Sunnis who’re more radical than the Shia… Al Qaeda is the one that’s most radical, so I think they’re Sunni. I may be wrong, but I think that’s right.”

No hint of of embarrassment. Team players conflating disparate groups in order to attack them as “Evil” or “Terror” don’t need to do much homework, or ask their staffs to research such obscure questions. Indeed, such questions produce umbrage. FBI spokesman John Miller berated Stein for the “cheap shot” of “playing ‘Islamic Trivial Pursuit.’”

What a damning statement. The differences between Muslims are trivial? That’s like saying that differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants in modern Europe have been trivial. This is willful ignorance, the stubborn desire to avoid inconvenient truths such as the fact that Shiite-Sunni differences virtually preclude Iranian involvement in al-Qaeda terrorism. The fact is, the 9-11 attacks on the U.S. generated a wave of sympathy for the U.S. in Iran, and thousands demonstrated their solidarity with the American people, not al-Qaeda. Iran moreover provided intelligence to the U.S. as it undertook its invasion of Afghanistan.

Time and again Congress has passed resolutions, with near unanimity, calling for sterner actions against Iran. AIPAC, however scandal-tainted, can boast an endless record of success in shaping legislators’ actions against Iran. Not only does Iran definitely have a nuclear weapons program, argues this unregistered foreign lobby group, but once it has a weapon it will surely use it against Israel, to inflict a “nuclear holocaust”! This foisting of a Big Lie on the American people is one of AIPAC’s greatest recent triumphs as it campaigns for the U.S. to bomb Iran on nuclear Israel’s behalf.

The current plan is advocated by Dennis Ross, advisor to the president on Iran working out of the White House for the National Security Agency. He has been in the Obama inner circle since the campaign — Obama’s neocon. Ross, whom a Jewish colleague in the State Department involved in U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian negotiations once matter-of-factly labelled “Israel’s lawyer,” says: “Everybody needs to worry about Iran.”   The plan involves imposing sanctions on Iran including an embargo on the export of gas to the country: an act of war designed to provoke a response justifying a massive assault destroying not just nuclear facilities but the entire government infrastructure.

Uncomfortable with U.S. plans, which are bound to further destabilize the region, Europe proposed a deal whereby Iran would send most of its low-enriched (3.5%) uranium to Russia, where the enrichment process for electricity producing purposes (20%) would be completed. Russia would then send the uranium to France for conversion into fuel rods before being sent back to Iran. This would alleviate any fears about Iranian enrichment plans prior to the activation of a nuclear reactor designed for medical research. The Iranians expressed interest, but also mistrust of the French, who had reneged on agreements with them in the past. The U.S., along with Britain and Germany, backed the European deal, if grudgingly, indeed demanded that Iran agree in order to stave off further sanctions. The UN backed it as well. The Iranians, however, declined to accept it last fall, citing specific concerns.

In the last week, following energetic diplomacy by Brazil and Turkey, both temporary members of the UN Security Council, it was announced that Iran would accept a version of the European plan. But Turkey, rather than Russia, would receive the low-enriched uranium. That’s (from the traditional State Department standpoint) secular Muslim Turkey, U.S. ally, NATO member, EU applicant. Friend of Israel as well as Iran. From the Iranian point of view, perhaps, an honest broker.

If Washington were sincere, there would have been champagne toasts last week in the White House. Finally, this problem’s resolved! But no! There were dour faces. “Too little, too late,” says one top official. “Given Iran’s repeated failure to live up to its own commitments, and the need to address fundamental issues related to Iran’s nuclear program,” says Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs, “we continue to have serious concerns.” Indeed, in worried anticipation of the Brazil-Turkey-Iran deal, the U.S. announced that the permanent Security Council members plus Germany had agreed on a new round of sanctions against Iran. Just saying this doesn’t make it so, and indeed the deal might quash the plot to bully the “international community” into backing Washington’s regime-change plot.

Washington is irked at both Brazil and Turkey for betraying the anti-Iran cause and even threatens to retaliate by opposing a permanent Brazilian seat on the Security Council and backing off on support for Turkey’s admission into the EU. Typical thuggery.

If Obama does diss the new agreement, the dishonesty of his Iran policy should be apparent to all. The real intention — the toppling of a third government in Muslim Southwest Asia, the better to establish long-term U.S. hegemony — ought to be plain. And the real character of the Obama administration, as yet another regime dependent on the manipulation of opinion via big lies and fear-mongering, ought also to become clear — even (hopefully, especially) in the minds of sometime supporters.

This is not the promised “change,” but more of the same. There is no “hope” here, but rather cause for deep foreboding. The same sort of foreboding, so soon validated, that many of us felt as of early 2003. But what to do? Calls to “your” Congressman/woman won’t do anything. Electing more people who pretend to be (sort of) anti-war won’t do jack-shit if their sense of political “realism” (and in Obama’s case, instinctive inclination towards “conciliation” with the most vicious proponants of ongoing aggression) causes them, upon taking office, to jump in bed with the military-industrial complex. And that is the norm, the default mode. The sincere anti-imperialist cannot survive long in Congress, any more than a freshwater fish in salt water.

Hope-spinner Obama’s capitulation to the liars shows that real change is hopeless under the status quo, that this system that never really triumphed after the collapse of “communism” in 1991 has just tread water, swimming into deepening crisis. Capitalism isn’t healthy. Capitalist imperialism isn’t healthy. U.S. imperialism specifically is in trouble, although Europe, whose share of the world economy now exceeds that of the U.S., is also in deep shit.

It would be so nice (think some) to buy some time for the teetering U.S. by conquering what the neocons call “the Greater Middle East.” But that means explaining the project to the people of this country. That gets really hard to do after Iran says “Yes” to what — up until last week — was a U.S.-backed offer.

On the very day that Japan regained its sovereignty (effective April 1952) with the signing of the San Francisco Treaty ending the state of war between Japan and the Allied Powers, Japan was forced to sign an agreement not only providing for tens of thousands of U.S. forces to remain in the country but even to suppress domestic uprisings. When the treaty came up for renewal in 1960, an estimated 16 million (17% of the population) took part in protests. Protests continued after LDP politicians, in a sneaky parliamentary maneuver in the dead of night, ratified the treaty. These were so intense that Japanese security forces advised President Eisenhower that they could not guarantee his safety during a planned state visit in order to sign the document.

The treaty (shorn of the provision about suppressing domestic uprisings) has been renewed regularly ever since. Polls in recent years suggest that ANPO (as it’s called in the Japanese acronym) has become accepted by the vast majority and that most Japanese believe U.S. bases “important” for regional security. (This represents, I think, a shikataganai or “nothing can be done about it” mentality, the feeling that it was Japan’s fate following wars of aggression to accept occupation and transformation. The fact that the country has prospered, in no small part due to U.S. war expenditures beginning with the Korean War, has weakened resistance to the treaty and the bases.

But most of the bases, and the bulk of the 33,000 U.S. troops in Japan, are stationed on the island of Okinawa. There are about 27,000 personnel, mostly Marines, and 22,000 family members. Military bases occupy 10% of the islands’s territory. Okinawans complain of lost land, incessant noise, the storage (to 1972) of U.S. nuclear weapons on the island (in violation of Japanese law), and GI crime. The reported U.S. military crime rate is higher here than anywhere else in the world; since 1972, 26,413 crimes and 456 accidents caused by U.S. military personnel have been reported. The brutal abduction and rape of a 12-year old girl by a seaman and two Marines in September 1995 fueled an already powerful movement to shut down the bases.

Many Okinawans not only dislike the U.S. presence but deeply resent the terms of their relationship with Tokyo. Until 1872 Okinawa was not part of Japan but an independent kingdom paying tribute to both Japan and China. Thereafter it was annexed by the newly-established Meiji state as its first act of colonization (Taiwan and Korea would follow in 1895 and 1910.) The Ryukyuan (Okinawan) language and Japanese are related but not mutually comprehensible, and there are cultural differences. Okinawans were treated like second-class citizens up to the Battle of Okinawa in the summer of 1945, when military authorities ordered the population to resist the invaders to the death. Up to 150,000 civilians were killed or committed suicide out of a population of 500,000.

Tokyo agreed in 1952 that “the United States will have the right to exercise all and any powers of administration, legislation and jurisdiction over the territory and inhabitants of [Okinawa], including their territorial waters.” This is also resented. Following mass campaigns and a parliamentary motion demanding return of the island, the U.S. returned Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty in 1972, but retaining the bases, now paid for by the Japanese. There was no military withdrawal, obviously, nor one ever planned.

Surely many Okinawans feel that (1) we never asked to be annexed by Japan; (2) we have met with discrimination at the hands of Japanese; (3) we took more than our share of punishment during the war for Japan’s aggression; and (4) we never asked for and don’t want these bases. There are, of course, those who make their livelihood from them, and are more positively disposed. But on April 27, more than 90,000 people (out of 1.4 million Okinawans) demanded that Futenma Marine Corps Air Station located in the center of Ginowan City be relocated off the island. (The U.S. and Japanese governments had agreed to remove it elsewhere on the island.) Many in the crowd called for the removal of the bases entirely.

Hatoyama’s Democrats won their victory last August in part because they pledged to press for the removal of Futenma from Okinawa, proposing its relocation to a smaller nearby island. They also demanded an end to the unpopular refueling mission in the Indian Ocean in support of the U.S. in Afghanistan and a more equal relationship with the U.S. “But” as Kenji Hall wrote in Bloomberg Businesweek, “on Nov. 13, after spending nearly an hour and a half in ‘densely packed’ discussions with President Barack Obama at the Prime Minister’s residence in Tokyo, the Japanese leader seemed a lot less combative. As for talking as equals, Hatoyama didn’t even get to raise the issue. ‘Even before I could say it, President Obama said that U.S.-Japan relations should be on an equal footing,’ he said as Obama stood by his side during a news conference televised live by public broadcaster NHK.”

Hatoyama’s popularity, 77% soon after the election and still 72% in late October, dipped to 50% in December, partly due to his apparent vacillation on the issue of an equal relationship. In January, the Democrats fulfilled their promise to end the eight-year refueling misson but offered $5 billion towards Afghan reconstruction to appease U.S. anger at the move. His popularity was then in the low 40s.

As recently as April, prior to the massive Okinawan demonstration, he declared, “It must never happen that we accept the existing plan [for Futenma relocation on Okinawa].” But this month he visited Okinawa, for his first time since becoming prime minister, announcing, “We must maintain the Japan-U.S. alliance as a deterrent force, and … we must ask Okinawa to bear some of that burden. It has become clear from our negotiations with the Americans that we cannot ask them to relocate the base to too far-flung a location.” In other words: We must obey the Americans, just as the LDP did for 54 years.

Hatoyama’s popularity is now down to around 20%. The Asahi Shinbun runs headlines such as “Weak Leadership” and “Hatoyama Strikes Out Again” referring to the Okinawa base issue. Far from being a breath of fresh air, he is more of the same. The U.S.-Japan relationship is not the only issue affecting his popularity; charges of corruption and mishandling of campaign funds, staples of Japanese politics and the nemesis of the LDP, also contribute. But this is probably the biggest issue.

The moral of the story? A change of parties in a U.S. client-state is unlikely to affect the bilateral relationship with the U.S., notwithstanding the popular will. De Gaulle could boot out the U.S. bases from France in 1966, but he is the exception to prove the rule. (He took action after U.S. efforts to supplant or even assassinate him due to his decision to grant Algeria independence, something Washington bitterly opposed, and wrangling over the role of France within NATO.) Hatoyama is no De Gaulle. Rather, in failing to stand up to Obama, he has become Japan’s Obama: a breaker of campaign promises, a capitulator, a pawn of the Pentagon, a tremendous disappointment to his supporters. But unlike the U.S. president, whose favorable ratings have only fallen from 68% in April 2009 to 44%, hovering around that figure all this year, Hatoyama’s appear to be in free-fall. Such is a lackey’s karma.